Harvey Butchart- Hiking Log, Volume 2

Harvey Butchart’s Hiking Log, Volume 2
August 6, 1964 - September 20, 1969

To conduct a full-text search of this volume, use the Find in Page Command (Control-F or under "Edit" in your browser's menu). For a complete chronological listing of trails and locations, please see Table of contents. For alphabetical listing of trails and locations, please see Index.
Butchart annotated a series of hiking maps, including western and eastern half of the Grand Canyon and others from throughout the Grand Canyon region that are also available.
Wayne Tomasi, a Grand Canyon hiking enthusiast, prepared the following version of Dr. Harvey Butchart's hiking log. Wayne spent hundreds of hours reading, typing, and editing the hiking logs housed at the Northern Arizona University Cline Library. This edited version of the Butchart hiking logs includes only hikes in the area that Harvey and Wayne mutually agreed to call Grand Canyon Country. This Country includes the Grand Canyon, Marble Canyon, the Little Colorado River Gorge, the Pria River Gorge and Plateau, Lake Powell, and Lake Mead. Wayne notes that his transcription of Butchart’s logs begins with Harvey’s brief introduction of backpacking. Harvey's description of Little Colorado River exploration has been moved to the beginning. Finally, a section of Butchart’s earliest logs, written by Harvey from memory, are segregated under a heading of 'Protologs.'
Use of the Butchart logs is restricted to non-commercial use only. Any reproduction and/or distribution of the logs (either the original Butchart logs or Wayne Tomasi's edited version) requires permission of the NAU Cline Library.
Copyright Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved.

Hermit Basin to Bass Canyon, Dragon and Crystal Creeks
[August 6, 1964 to August 11, 1964]

After some good chit chat at the Visitor's Center with the Chief Ranger (Lynn Coffin), I got started down the Hermit Trail carrying about the heaviest pack I have tried, 37 pounds. My objective was Supai in 11 days with some interesting side trips along the way. The stage of water was not too much different from what it had been for my trip through Marble Canyon and I thought that 12 to 15 miles a day was quite feasible.

In Hermit Basin I met seasonal ranger Marge Goff on her way back from a nature hike to Santa Maria Spring.In our short conversation, she assured me that several of the rangers were now waging a war of extermination against the burros and that they would soon all be gone. I didn't express my views on that subject very forcibly, but from what I have read about previous attempts, I would say that about all they can hope to do is to keep the numbers in check. Unless they would have a regular military campaign, enough burros would escape to bring back the race. It would take a lot of men willing to go down into a lot of exhausting terrain simultaneously to get the job done. I am not even sure I favor the project anyway. No doubt it is more thrilling to observe deer or bighorn sheep, but I got quite excited in seeing my first wild burro. Also, the trails are much more distinct in those areas of the canyon where there are burros. With my heavy pack, I used six hours to get to the river instead of the three and a half which would be possible with only a lunch and canteen. My Kelty pack is rather bad in the prone position on an air mattress since it holds my head down. I need two mattresses to hold my nose out of the water and I have ten inches of the lower mattress projecting in front of the one which supports my face. If all the river were like the stretches from Hermit to Boucher Creek and from there to Crystal Creek, and if all rapids were as easy to walk around as Boucher, my schedule would have been feasible. You can walk the boulder bar almost as easily as a trail. I covered the three miles From Hermit to Crystal Creek at two miles an hour. Unfortunately, this was the exception. For the rest of the way to Serpentine Canyon, the rapids were closer together and the way around them was over big angular blocks of schist. Getting out of the water had to be done in soft mud, and then the mud on the sneakers made the footing precarious. I soon learned another thing. The rule that the portage should be made on the side of the tributary stream had about as many exceptions as not. I ended by playing it safe. I would land on whichever side would give me a view of the rapid ahead from farthest upstream. If the opposite side offered the better chance to walk to the foot of the rapid, I could still cross over. Just once this portaging had to be modified. At Mile 99.6, the nameless ravine from the north downstream from Tuna Creek, blocks have fallen that break the low stage of the river into three channels. A land bypass would have to go quite high on the south wall and with a 35 pound pack, I decided that this would be more hazardous than taking the fast water. It was getting late Saturday evening when I landed on the south side, so I decided to camp and think it over until morning. From most places I could have gone upriver by paddling in the slack water next to the cliffs and walking the talus slopes between, but the current had been strong right to the Wall below Tuna Creek Rapid. Over at the right, the channel was visibly rough while the water looked smooth between two big rocks on the left. In the morning, I put one mattress in my pack and draped myself transversely across the other. I had time enough to kick myself into any chosen channel. When I found myself going over the one with the smooth appearance, I saw why it was so smooth. It dropped abruptly two or three feet on a number of rocks that were hidden from my viewpoint, necessarily a distance upstream. I stayed right side up on the mattress, but the water spun me so fast that I didn't have time to fend away. I bruised my elbow on one rock and scraped the mattress stiffly on both sides before I was out in the clear. The deep water was eddying every which way, and I had to climb on the mattress in paddling position before I could drive it out of that pocket. This was rather difficult with my heavy pack, and I may have stuck a finger nail through the rubberized nylon. At any rate I soon realized that my raft was sinking slowly. I soon found the small tear and fixed it with adhesive tape, but the mattress continued to leak somewhere else. My other mattress had a slow leak before the trip began. I could still navigate for an hour or so between rapids and then give them some more air before pushing off again. But this experience sobered me to the extent that I deided to leave the river at the Bass Trail. Furthermore, below Crystal Creek, I had averaged less than one mile per hour. I might have taken a chance on improving this speed, but my wet socks chafed through the outer skin, and I was convinced. I also decided that shorter trips are more to my liking than the lonesomeness of 11 days by myself.

So much for the navigation. On Thursday night I camped on the sand just east of the mouth of Crystal Creek.The only drawback was the large red ants. In the morning, I wrapped all but two days' supply of food in a plastic sheet and left it in the shade of a large rock and started up the creekbed. But first I found the Indian ruins Dock had told me about, up on the high terrace to the west of the mouth. In about 40 minutes I came to a place where chockstones had formed a fall, but there was a neat bypass formed by deer and bighorn. Incidentally, I saw bighorn tracks on the sand near Boucher Rapids as well as up Crystal and Dragon Canyons. They seem to be as common as the deer in this area. In 75 minutes I came to the tributary from the west which comes from the bay below Mencius Temple. Some water was flowing. I had maps for all the areas I hoped to encounter during the trip except for Crystal and Dragon. Now I mistook this for Crystal itself and left my blanket and mattress above the creek on a bench. After walking about two and a half hours from the river, I came to the real junction of Crystal and Dragon. About half as much water comes from Crystal as from Dragon Creek, which might let us conjecture that Harry McDonald would have continued up Dragon.

As you get into the lower Tapeats, the bed suddenly goes dry. I had to back up a few yards to fill my canteen. The tributary coming from the bay west of Shiva looks just as impressive at the junction as the main bed which is somewhat choked with willows here. I went up the tributary and when I had seen my error, I decided to climb out and get a view of the country. Progress north over the detrital ridges was laborious, but I could see that the main canyon was getting very narrow in the Tapeats so I concluded that I should stay above the Tapeats rim. From here a break in the Redwall was evident, about due north of the west end of Shiva. There has been a lot of breakage of the Redwall, and a slump of Supai Sandstone as well as limestone forms a ramp over the Bright Angel Shale to the base of the Redwall. I continued along the top of the Redwall until I could see into the bay north of Shiva. One could probably get through all the higher formations clear around to the north side of this bay, but it was already 1:30 p.m., so I turned back. This may have been McDonald's route to the rim, but I would rather expect him to go up the creekbed much farther before climbing out. Miles away in the west arm of Dragon, the bed seemed to penetrate quite a bit of the Redwall. Possibly the Stanton climbing party used this break in the Redwall. At least there seemed to be no other break farther south. On the return, I went to the bed of the creek and almost went to the lip of the dry fall into the Tapeats gorge. A well developed deer and sheep trail goes east around this barrier and descends by a break a quarter of a mile downstream. There is a permanent spring in this upper portion of the Tapeats gorge, but when I got to the bottom, it was supplemented by a stiff rain which I sat out under an overhang with my magazine to pass the time. When I reached my blanket, it was dripping wet, but by hanging it on a mesquite near a fire, it got dry enough to use by midnight, the earliest that I ever wanted cover during this warm season.

There were two ideas for the next day, to look at the bases of the Tower of Ra and Osiris Temple, and if there was time, to go up Crystal Creek far enough to see the valley above the Tapeats. The first chance to get out of the lower gorge of Crystal is by the canyon draining the bay between Ra and Osiris (wrong). I was able to get through the Tapeats at a break on the south side about a half mile up from the main stream. Here I found a piece of float copper ore that weighed considerably more than ordinary sandstone. Perhaps I should have gone close to the Redwall ravine north of Ra, but from my viewpoint, there didn't seem to be any chance of climbing it. I started the return down the bottom of the bed, but a fall halfway through the Tapeats forced me back out to the north where I had seen that one could go to the bottom through the Hakatai Shale which shows well here. The deeper rocks of this amphitheater seem pretty complicated. It would take a real geologist to diagram all the outcroppings of Base Limestone, Shinumo Quartzite, etc. For instance, on the west side of Crystal, the Tapeats seems quite a bit higher than it does on the east side.

The trip up Crystal was easy. The grade seemed a bit steeper and I got into the Tapeats sooner than I had in Dragon. The inner gorge through this sandstone is particularly striking for being narrow and deep. One wall supported quite a growth of maidenhair fern. There were deer tracks here which led me to think that one might get through without a block. Just as the rims were getting low, there was a 20 foot fall which could not be bypassed. The place had been so pretty and shady that I didn't begrudge the time I had been there although I had to back up some distance to get around the Tapeats. I went up on the west side, but I could see from there that the easier way, marked by a deer trail, was on the east. After going several hundred feet above the bed to get pictures of the upper valley, I went back to the river in time to paddle down to camp at the nameless ravine just west of Tuna. From the Tonto Trail south of the river, I had seen a place where it seemed easy to get through the Tapeats, but from below I couldn't locate it. I knew by now that river travel would be slow, so I decided to call off the side trips and concentrate on getting to Supai.

I have already described the rough ride through the barrier rocks just below my camp. Another rapid that impressed me was the one about one third mile upstream from Ruby, which seems to drop about four feet in only 20 yards. At the low stage there seemed to be no channel. The rocks appeared to be covered with not more than a foot of water in many places. I wonder what the Sport Yak Party did here? The Sunday night camp was at Serpentine and was early enough to relax. There had been no ants at all on the sand on the south side of the river at Mile 99.4 and only a few at the mouth of Serpentine.

In starting on the next morning, I thought I might see what Colin Fletcher had done in going from Bass to Serpentine mostly on land. Even when I tried the south slope to get below the lower part of the rapid, I found it so slow that I got back in the water to reach the tail end of the fast water. After a few more yards of walking, I got back into the river for the next hour that brought me to Bass Rapids and the abandoned metal boat. By steady paddling, I could make about a mile an hour. It was still early in the day, but I knew it would be a long haul to get from there to Hermit Rest so I decided to use Monday mostly to rest.

First I carried my pack to Bedrock Tank. I had never seen water here before, but this time there was some dripping over the fall, and there were small pools in the gravel below. There are still some tools cached here from the days when Bass was alive. Something I hadn't noticed before was a three inch pipe driven back into a crevice with a regular valve fitting at the end. After stowing my gear where I thought it would be safe both from rain and a flood, I found the trail up to the west and visited the old copper mine in Copper Canyon. First I checked the trail, still well preserved, that goes along the east wall above the mine. After going north high in the schist, it starts down. When Cureton and Finicum had been with me, we had left this trail when it started down. This time I followed it down, but it soon ended.

There was less water in the vertical mine shaft than I had expected, but there were rain pools in the creekbed. Instead of going on to the Hakatai Cable as I had thought I might, I decided instead to loaf with my magazine on the old cot in the mine shaft.

On Tuesday I reached the rim in four hours and 37 minutes and then reached the car by 9:30 p.m. Mostly on the Bass Trail I just plodded along expecting no surprises after the number of times I had covered it, but once I stopped for a breather about where the west half map has the name BASS for Bass Canyon, between the two bench marks. For the first time, I saw a neat hole through the Supai rim at the top of the wall to the east. I would estimate the hole to be about 10 feet across with nearly 100 feet of solid rock above it. I wonder how well known this window is? Another observation that broke the monotony was a rattlesnake sunning itself on the trail in the Supai. It didn't rattle but casually moved out of my way when I would have stepped on it in two more strides.

After scoring with that new to me window, I got careless and missed seeing the Indian ruins near where the trail comes to the top of the Coconino. Another thing that I missed this time were the dams in the creekbed at the top of the Coconino which Bass had built to catch water. If they are going to conduct nature hikes part way down the Bass Trail, as Marge Goff had said, the guide might do well to locate these interesting old structures. The authorities might also have to worry about the state of the road near the last part on the way to Bass Camp. It is in much worse condition now than it was a year and a half ago and I would think an ordinary car might have trouble on it.

The burro situation seems about the same as I have known it. I saw tracks near the mouth of Boucher and there were two burros browsing below the Redwall along the Hermit Trail. There were no signs in the Crystal Dragon Basin. There were signs at the mouth of Serpentine, and plenty of tracks in Bass and Copper Canyons. I heard them bray in both of these canyons.

North Rim trip off Cape Royal and to the Indian ruins near Point Sublime
[August 22, 1964 to August 26, 1964]

The first thing I did was to drive to Kanab where I finally connected with Preston Swapp. I am a little skeptical when old timers are glib with all details concerning some exploit that happened 20 or 30 years before. Preston was realistically vague and confused about many points. First he thought they had followed the top of the wall connecting Cape Royal to Wotan's Throne, 500 feet below their tops. When I pointed out the deep notch, he agreed that they must have gone along the shale on the east side of the wall. He didn't remember much about where they came back up the Coconino, but he agreed with my suggestion that it was at the southwest end right under Wotan. He reread the Andrews' article and studied the pictures before he pointed to the ridge that he thought they had climbed, the one directly above the end of the wall. He disagreed with the idea that they had left several fixed ropes for the return. He thought there was only one, whereas Wood, in the American Alpine Journal, lists about six. Swapp remembers very clearly that they did get on top, but agrees that they stayed on top only a short time, just long enough for him to go over to the south rim and get water. He also remembers distinctly that he found a very old and rusty tin can on top near where he found the water. He says they slept another night at the base of the Coconino below Cape Royal. He has no recollection of Andrews' narrow escape, but figures that George stepped on some loose gravel and sat down once. He thought that he himself showed up better on that kind of climbing than the others, and he says he was opposed all the time to being tied to the rest on the final climb to the top. He didn't like the idea of one man pulling all the rest with him. My impression was that he honestly didn't remember much about the trip except that they did get to the top. I don't think that he was covering up for the others who claimed the ascent, but I would have preferred an informant who could remember a few more details about how they did things. He didn't know about climbing a rope by the Prusik method. His impression was that he had gone up about everything without a rope at all.

By the time I had visited with some of the rangers and secured a permit to climb Wotan on Monday, there was not much left of Sunday. I did go down along the top of the Coconino from the campground north to the ranger village but couldn't see anything that looked like a passage. Maybe there is a break farther to the south. I should check this before I say that it takes an awfully good climber to make it through here. One of the fire fighting maintenance men, Jim Fain, said that a man he knows came up out of the Transept and surprised a couple girls who were taking sun baths in the nude.

Sunday night, after seeing the movie on the upriver trip in the jet boats, I drove out to the Walhalla Glades parking and slept just above where I wanted to go down Monday morning. By 6:30 a.m., I was on my way with eight quarts of water and a 120 foot rope. The way down to the rappel was just as I had remembered it, a little brushy, plenty of loose rocks, and a couple places that require a short chimney climb. The place I tied the rope must have been the same as it was two years ago, a clump of pale hoptrees. (Identification due to Ed Rothfuss who came down on Tuesday to help me retrieve the rope.) It seemed solid enough, but I had a qualm or two when I was in mid air halfway down. Another thing I should remember is that the new rope, one half inch in diameter went through the carabineer more easily with the same three turns around the metal than did the old rope which was five eighths inch in diameter. When I was about 15 feet from the bottom hanging free of the wall, the rope began to slide through the ring faster than I wanted it to. I suppose I could have gripped the rope with my left hand hard enough to stop it, but I let it slide at an accelerating pace and was a little surprised that my hand wasn't burned by the time I hit the bottom. I was glad this hadn't happened on the rappel that seemed a lot higher below Cape Royal. I should have had a practice session with the new rope.

At the bottom of the rappel, I filled my two quart canteen from the Purex bottle and left that behind. I thought that six quarts from here on would be plenty when I would find plenty at the foot of the rope to get me up on the return. This trip from the rim to the Hermit Shale had taken two hours compared to the one and a quarter hours I had logged on my trip with Allyn Cureton two years ago. Walking the shale slope seemed rather discouraging this time, and I wanted to change my view that it had seemed safer than traveling the Nankoweap Trail near the top of the Supai. I reached the base of the wall connecting Cape Royal to Wotan in only five minutes more than I had taken with Allyn, but I felt weak and lacking ambition. At the time I thought that it was my age finally getting to me, but later I decided it was probably my head cold. Anyway, the water went so fast during an early lunch that I decided to turn back. The return to the rope was made at a very leisurely speed, and I saw some good fossil footprints in a loose block of Coconino just before I reached the ravine. After a slow and sloppy job of Prusiking, I got up the rope and pulled my pack up, this operation taking an hour and a quarter. I was so sure I never wanted to do anything like this again that I left the rope where it was. After cleaning up, eating, and sleeping; I was ready to reconsider. Ed Rothfuss was off duty, and I got him to go back with me to see the ravine and encourage me while I brought the rope out. He was following me about 80 and 60 feet below the rim when he spotted two sets of pictographs. They were in red clay on light parts of the Kaibab under overhangs. Some of the designs were quite familiar, but there were a number of odd drawings like a grid of city streets. Rothfuss then took me to the southwest corner of the campground and showed me the way down to a small platform ruin that I think our family visited 18 years ago. A good many girls who work at the lodge had known all about this ruin, but none of the rangers knew where it was until Rothfuss looked for it a few days before.

Before we parted, Ed told me how to find the ruin I had heard was out near Point Sublime. Quite a number of the rangers had visited it just this summer. About two and a half miles north of Point Sublime are several cairns on the east side of the road. Since you have to walk about ten minutes to get to the rim, they can all be regarded as correct. To get an idea of what you are trying to do, it is well to study the rim from the Point Sublime picnic area. About a mile and a half to the north, the rim turns east. There are a couple ravines or breaks where one can go down through the Kaibab here, and the southwesterly one is the place. A cairn marks the immediate spot on the rim where you should start down. On Wednesday morning, I drove out to Point Sublime and then found the ruins within 40 minutes of leaving the car. I did foul up a little and went down one dead end ravine. The next one south went down through the Kaibab nicely with a good deer trail. Near its head, I found two sherds and brought the best one away for identification. Since the ruin was not around the corner to the south, I went across the next ravine and found it, a row of neat granaries and a small chamber on the ledge below. Some daredevils have climbed from the top of a juniper on a couple boards to a higher ledge. (Lex Lindsay identified the sherd as Dogoszhi black on white, 1050 ad.)

My cold kept me from wanting to do any real hiking, so I went home Wednesday afternoon.

Point Sublime, Dragon, Shiva Saddle, and Salt Water Wash
[August 31, 1964 to September 3, 1964]

Dirk Springorum the German geology student who went with me on several trips last year, was back at the Museum and he accepted my invitation to go with me back to the north rim.

We got our permit at the ranger station announcing as the principal objective to find the location of the route from Point Sublime to Tuna Creek. I had studied the route from the map and from distant views from the south rim and thought it would be easy to go down a mile north and west to the rim. From there we thought we could proceed to the saddle between Flint and Tuna Creeks and walk down easily into Tuna. On Monday afternoon we spent several hours looking at the area. We could get down to the top of the Coconino at the place I had picked. In a couple places the Coconino was partially broken or covered by a talus, but we decided that it wasn't safe without a rope, and I wanted a ropeless route. Below Point Sublime the Coconino and Supai would be easy, and one could get below the Kaibab by way of the big ravine to the west (farther west than the one through which the road runs). We could not be a bit sure of the route through the Redwall. The drop from the Flint Tuna saddle is much steeper than I had thought from the road on the way out, we left after a good night at the picnic area.

The route we wanted to look at came down on the west side of the Dragon. The morning light made the Redwall seem more difficult than it had in the afternoon. There would be a lot of manzanita on the way down. While studying it from the viewpoint where the road nicks the rim of Crystal, we changed our minds again. We decided to walk on the Dragon and possibly attempt an ascent of the Dragon's Head. I told Dirk that I wouldn't set my heart on that one since I had been getting frustrated so often lately. We found the fire road to the basin in good shape. About the time I thought we might be getting into position for a take off to the Dragon, we found red paint blazes marking a trail this way, so it was safe to conclude that we had found the right route. It is quite hard to identify the various ravines shown on the map so we were quite grateful to have the paint and later yellow plastic ribbons to follow. The route goes south from the road at Crystal Ridge, then veers west across Milk Creek rather near the rim. You dip rather low through the scrub oak on the east side of the first spine of rock outcrops. At the south end of this spine there are no more trail markers, but it seems sure that you are supposed to go to the west of the next spine. We kept high here which put us into locust thickets. On the way back, we found a fair deer trail below the thickets, except that we had to fight our way through scrub oak at the saddle to get back on the marked trail. Before we got to the steep climb up on the Dragon, we found the deer trail. It took 105 minutes to get from the car to the top of the Dragon.

Once on the Dragon, we soon found supplies for fire fighters hanging from a tree, some of which were wrapped in a couple parachutes. One red parachute was still high up where it had caught in a tree. The smoothest walking south along the Dragon is first to the west rim and then to the east rim. The walk takes about 45 minutes. You get down from the south end of the Dragon on the east side just before you reach the tip. The deer trail then switches over to the west side of the ridge south to Dragon's Head. We lost the trail as we approached the rock ledges below the Head. To climb the Head, you go where most of the green shows from a distance, but there are still some ledges. We may have found the only climbable break at one place. You seem to have to go up, turn left, up again, and then right to a debris filled ravine leading to the top. I have done harder climbs, but I was glad Dirk was along to bolster my morale. It took four hours to get back from the top of the Head to the car. There seemed to be no cairns on top, but we built two small ones, the first where we topped out and the other at what we considered to be the highest point, near the north end. It didn't take long to walk the rim and get some pictures. From the top of Dragon's Head, we had a fine view of the Redwall route I had ascended north of Shiva Temple on the east side of Dragon Creek. We could also see a very probable route down into Dragon Creek from the saddle between Shiva and the north rim. We decided to inspect this on Wednesday. After getting the view from Tiyo Point, we first parked about a mile to the north. Then I thought we could drive closer if we used the fork marked Shiva Xp Pt. This was harder to follow than it had been in 1957 and I thought that we would certainly have trouble finding the car at its end. We went back and parked on the Tiyo Point road. It took 40 minutes to cross the various ravines and reach the point of departure which is just east of the ravine that is east of the promontory reaching toward Shiva Temple. Getting down and crossing this ravine to the ridge is the rough part, but there is a good deer trail along the east side of the ridge. We lost the trail and fumbled in getting started down the Coconino. You have to get below the top cliff at the end, but don't start down through the lowest part of the Toroweap into the Coconino until you are over to the west. There is a fair trail through the top of the Coconino down to the talus where no trail is needed.

We first checked the draw at the north end of the saddle. After going below the top cliff of Supai, we were baffled by the second. Then we went to the south end and found that the way down is easy at the north edge of this bay. The whole Supai is broken down and covered with a talus below this place, and the Redwall even looks very fair. However, if there is any difficulty in the ravine itself, one could go along the top and reach the place where I had come up before. If McDonald was using his eyes, he would have come up this way. Dirk found a couple pieces of very poorly preserved pottery on the saddle nearby, and on our way back I showed him the first mescal pit that is just to the north of the red rocks which are at the south end of the saddle.

We also saw a very probable alternate route into Dragon Creek. It is from the tip of Little Dragon down into the west of Dragon Creek. There is a lot of manzanita on this route.

On Thursday we broke up our trip home with a walk to the Colorado River down Salt Water Wash as described by Pat Reilly. I had neglected to bring his instructions and we made about all the mistakes in the approach that he did. We didn't climb the point and see the row of monuments until we were out of the canyon. We drove the Jeep too far along the top toward the river and tried one side wash that didn't lead to the bottom. Then we drove across country around to the south of this drainage and found the trail going down. Dirk was leading most of the time and he went so fast down the bed of the wash that we didn't locate the trail along the talus to the west until we were coming out. At the drop near where the shale begins, he climbed down past the chockstones while I found the trail around to the west. On the wide slope to the river, I found a few cairns high on the west side, but the old trail was so eroded that I could make better time by joining Dirk in the bed. We got down from the car to the Colorado River in 62 minutes, and using more of the trail, from the river to the car in 100 minutes. On the way out, Dirk spotted three sticks placed near the ceiling of a shallow cave. Together they formed a sort of shelf, and Indians may have tried to keep food away from rodents up here. It was similar to the device near the driftwood platform in Marble Canyon. We enjoyed a swim, rather cold, and a rest at the river which was running clear. We found a board which had been painted and nailed to a shovel handle and propped up by rocks. We wondered whether this was the memorial to Brown, the president of D.G.C. and P. Railroad.

It was a good four days, and it left me with a desire to go back for more.

Tanner Wash
[September 19, 1964]

I stopped at Bitter Springs gas station and had a chat with Leroy Arnold, the manager. He had never been to the sinkhole, Ah Hol Sa, but he suggested leaving the highway about a quarter of a mile to the north. The side road appears to be headed for a couple of hogans, but just before it reaches the first, there is a branch turning north. It goes right to Ah Hol Sa without a fork and it ends there. Arnold said that he understood the sinkhole to be a half mile across and 500 feet deep. It took me eight minutes to make the circuit about 30 feet away from the rim, so I figure that it is about 500 feet across and about 150 feet deep. The place to climb down is at a break on the west side. It looked bad enough to scare me away when I was by myself without a rope. The bottom is generally covered with clay and rather smooth except for a hole in the clay over to the west and several big blocks of limestone near the northeast. There are a couple of drainage channels toward these blocks.

The next part of my plan was to head for the river along the right rim of Tanner Wash to get the picture of what the lower portion of the bed is like. I could see where the narrow part of the wash ended abruptly at cliffs near the top of the Hermit Shale. A steep talus goes along the base of the Kaibab and appears to connect with the creekbed farther south. I could see a definite place where a broad talus connected this upper bench with the bed of the wash below all obstructions. I knew that one cannot go down the bed through the Supai to the river, but from the rim I could see that one can go upstream along the top of the Supai about a half mile to a break where you can make it through to the river (false, two and a half miles to Salt Water Wash). Thus the entire route down Tanner Wash to the river depended on one's chance of getting down the bed far enough to reach the bench below the Kaibab. It took less than an hour to walk back from the point overlooking the river to the end of the road at Ah Hol Sa.

I drove the Jeep back heading several drainages until I could see the Bitter Springs settlement and parked again. Heading west, I soon came to a large cairn and went down into this streambed. In about 20 minutes from the car, I came to the main bed of Tanner Wash. Near the junction is a stretch of improved trail for sheep.The attraction isn't hard to find. As soon as the Kaibab Formation is passed, there are abundant pools of water. These continue at frequent intervals and many of them are quite deep. I saw no fish and not even a tadpole. The summer floods must have cleaned them out. I had even seen pools in the lower valley deep in the shale. There were very few places where one couldn't have scrambled up one side or the other in case a flood started to come down from above. I have been in many worse places for being trapped by a flood. I continued until I was well down in the Coconino, but I was finally stopped by some climbing that might have been possible for a very agile person who could count on a companion going for a rope in case of difficulty. You can't see out into the broad part of the canyon below at this point, and I felt that there were other difficulties ahead before one would reach the place where the broad view is possible.

Retracing my steps about 200 yards, I was able to climb to the bench at the base of the Kaibab Limestone. The walking here was without any signs of a deer trail, but one could go about as easily as along the Hermit Shale below Cape Royal or many other steep rock strewn slopes in the Grand Canyon. In less than half an hour, I was around the bend looking down on the broad lower canyon. If the Glanton Party left the bed and did this, they could have felt that they were looking down on the Grand Canyon, but still they couldn't see water. If they were eager to see the canyon, it would have been much easier to keep on top of the plateau where there are many viewpoints for seeing the river itself. From where I turned back, one can't see the talus that leads on to the bed below. This route may be possible on both sides, but the one I am sure of is on the west side. Thus Jackass, Salt Water, and Tanner all furnish routes away from the river, but the length of the walk gets longer each time you go farther west. I would estimate that you could walk from the water a half mile upstream from Sheerwall Rapid to the plateau by way of Tanner Wash in about four hours.

To the Colorado River below President Harding Rapid and the pole platform
[September 20, 1964]

Tibbetts and Grua went up beyond the bridge and were stopped. Then they came out from Buck Spring Canyon and climbed down to where only 20 feet separated them from completion of the route. (Finally, they climbed all the way up.)

After sleeping in the Jeep where Eminence Break meets the rim, I got an early start Sunday morning. Care must be exercised constantly on the loose footing, but I reached the fossil footprints on the huge blocks of Coconino in 35 minutes. I was a little surprised to find a solitary woodpecker down here drilling on a dead stalk of agave. In 20 more minutes I reached my inconspicuous cairn that marks where you can turn out of the bed below the top cliffs of Supai on the east and find better walking. I couldn't make up my mind whether to stay high and head the small canyon in the Redwall or whether to go on down into the bed of the wash and go below this Redwall cleft. Finally, I compromised and kept going down but farther to the south than I had before. This took me along the base of the Redwall on my left. The route turned out to be the best yet. Not far from where this route brought me back to the bed of the main wash from where I had started down, I found a mescal pit. It was unlike most in that there were very few stones in a pile, but there was a distinct circle with a good bit of charcoal lying around. After I had gone to the bottom and gotten out above the Redwall on the other side of the converging drainages, I found some tracks of men's boots. There seemed to be more than one person. They were coming away from the river. I didn't follow them far, and I saw no more tracks except from deer all day. I don't see how my own tracks could have lasted from a year ago through the winter frosts and all the storms. The route down the final pitch into the inner canyon was quite perceptible most of the time and there were places where men had lined up rocks beside the trail and had built several cairns. (It took me 127 minutes to go down and 165 minutes to come back up.)

After getting the word from several people that the Platform of Poles was in plain sight from the river, I studied the wall in the general region where I knew it must be until I could see it from the left bank. It was as high as I had thought, about 250 feet above the water, but it was farther to the west than I had been looking last year. The impression, obtained from Gordon Denipah, that one goes right by the cave with the stick fitted below the ceiling, was erroneous. The separation of the routes is quite a bit below the cave and to the west. It was just a steep scramble to the crack where Euler must have turned back. No boost was necessary, just routine wriggling to get up through this crack. I had left my knapsack and even my canteen at the river after making the crossing on the air mattress. Footing above the crack was sometimes precarious and the exposure was a bit nerve racking. As one approached the platform, there was only an 18 inch wide ledge at one point. Knowing that Denipah had done this, I was encouraged to continue. There was one discrepancy between Denipah's account and my experience. Gordon said that he got a plain view of the platform from about 15 feet away but was unable to get any closer. I don't understand his difficulty. When you get that close, you can continue to the brink right above the platform. I didn't do it, but I feel that I could have lain on my stomach and allowed my feet to slide down until they touched the poles. I was strong in my impression that these poles were driftwood from the river. They were all rather straight and were juniper if I am a judge (Grua and Ellen Tibbetts crossed and climbed beyond). The main supporting poles had been cut to the right lengths to fit the natural nitches in the rock. The largest one was farthest out and was about five inches in diameter. A number of these had been blown out of place. Extra poles were clustered towards the east side, leaving a big gap on the outside to the west. I could see one small pole lying on the rocks 80 feet below. When I was through taking about five pictures from the ledge to the east and above the platform, I retraced the route down and went below for another picture. Lying here was a pole of the same material from which I sawed a foot long sample for further study. (A Ph.D in forestry says the wood is cottonwood.)

This platform could be quite ancient (770 ad using Carbon 14 dating at the University of Michigan) because it is protected from all but the most oblique rain by a large projecting slab of rock. It can hardly be called a bridge since one can't go a yard past it on the west side and the surface of the rock gives no sign of any recent fall. My conjecture is that it might have been a place for meditation. (Grua and Tibbetts crossed and climbed out.)

Salt Trail Canyon
[October 10, 1964 to October 11, 1964]

The most unusual thing about this trip was the personnel: Marshall Demick from New York City, Dirk Springorum from Germany, John O'Brian from England, and Bodil Helt from Denmark. We reached the head of the trail about 11:00 a.m. but first we walked along the rim to look directly into Salt Trail Canyon from above. I had the idea that the trace of a road would lead us to a point between Salt Trail Canyon and Big Canyon from which we could take pictures directly down the Little Colorado River, but we stopped the car too soon for that.

We soon saw that Miss Helt was going to slow us down a little, but she kept up a fair speed until we got to the Supai Sandstone. Here Marshall went to the west side of the wash to skirt a small cliff. I took the rest along the marked trail up under the cliff along the east side. At one place the trail seemed to be gone and since Marshall seemed to be making better time than the rest of us along the bottom of the wash, I led the rest down to join him. This was a mistake as we found on the return. The trail below the top Supai cliff down to the cross over at the start of the Redwall is mostly rather good. We found plenty of water in pools in the bed although it hadn't rained for several weeks. Bodil became quite tired about the time we reached the beginning of the Redwall and crossed to the west rim and Marshall carried her pack in addition to his own.

I had just read the paper by Titiev in the 1937 American Anthropologist, but I couldn't make any more positive identification of landmarks than I had before. We found three places where pilgrims had piled small rocks on the top of big ones, quite close together, a little north of the place where the trail starts down the Redwall. These small stones are mostly chert, but they come from the vicinity and not from the rim as I once had thought. We noticed the name J. D. Baumgartner, USGS, 6/8/52. Another date without a name was scratched on a rock higher up the trail, 5/7/58. We appreciated the frequent cairns all along the trail especially for the Redwall descent. The Little Colorado was flowing a light tan on Saturday, but before we left on Sunday, it was a milky blue.

A mouse chewed pile of prospector's supplies was just above the high watermark at the east edge of the delta. There were cans of tomatoes, many cans of Vienna sausages, a pan or two, two sleeping bags looking quite new, and farther upstream a stout nylon rope tied around a clump of willows. The rope was buried under sand and mud in several places. We had a good time swimming and swapping stories around the fire. In the morning Dirk and John went on down river to the Colorado for a week of geologizing. I walked upstream to take some pictures, and Bodil and Marshall started out about 75 minutes ahead of me. We all got out in good shape.

Something that interested me was the travertine. Some of the wood that had been cemented into the travertine was still there. Perhaps it had once been entirely sealed in, and only recently been exposed by further erosion. The level of this travertine was at least 15 feet above the present river level. It would be interesting to know how old the wood could be without rotting away. (Travertine dams were cut by the flood of 1923.)

Steamboat Mountain
[October 17, 1964]

A student, Marshall Demick, went with me to Swamp Point Friday evening and we slept next to the car. Both of us were wide awake by 5:30 on Saturday morning and we were going down the trail to the saddle by 6:00 a.m. The cabin just west of the saddle had one broken window and two were swinging open. We were able to follow the old trail to Powell Spring, but it is getting rather overgrown with maples. The scarlet leaves were mostly on the ground and past their prime, but there were streaks on the hillsides, especially below the Coconino, that were a deep pink for a half mile at a time.

At the end of the trail, the best walking was along the bed of the wash, but there were places where it was a fight to make any progress. There are several drops in the bed after one gets into the Supai. The upper ones are minor and can be detoured by only a short scramble through the brush to the side. The lower half of the Supai is something else. You can detour to either side, but you have to walk along the steep benches through rather bad brush occasionally for 25 minutes until you can get down. We went to the south this time instead of to the north as I had with Jerry Bortle in 1962. We doubled back to a slide near the head of a canyon tributary to the south but we later saw that we could have continued west and descended the point where the two arms come together.

We went down the bed of this southern arm and continued down Saddle Canyon bypassing an upper fall in the Redwall where it becomes the bed. After we looked at the narrows where the stream has cut into the high Redwall on the north side of the fault, we went back and up to the top of the ridge to the south where the deer get by the barrier falls in the Redwall narrows. From the top of this bypass, we continued up the slope to the south and broke through the brush into the pinyon pine and juniper forest that covers the Hermit Shale. It was tiring but not difficult to climb the talus that reaches up on the Coconino at the northeast corner of the mountain. At the place where the Coconino looked possible, we found that we were not mistaken. I left my extra jug of water and Marshall left, against my advice, all his food and water at the base of the Coconino. As I had predicted, he was drinking from my canteen before we returned. The break in the Coconino was so obvious from below that I neglected to build a cairn at the top of the break. On the return I walked right by the place and had to go out on a point to look before I learned about the mistake.

To get up the Toroweap cliff, we went southeast. We were able to get up by an obscure crack before we had gone as far as a place that was obviously broken down. On the return I was glad to find the cairn I built at the top of this route. From a distance, going up the Kaibab cliff had seemed sure if we got close in this direction. We found trees growing quite high on the slope, but in most of the ravines along here, there is an impassible 30 foot wall at the top. I picked one that I thought might have a crack out of sight at the top and Marshall went to inspect the next one to the west. I should have put my canteen in the pack and then worn the pack in front. Instead, I put both at the base of the crack and chimney climbed past a chockstone and got up only to find that Marshall was stopped at the top of this ravine. I told him to come up mine while I proceeded to explore the top of the mountain. The valley that separated the north rim from the main part of the summit goes down to the west right through the Kaibab. One can walk around to the west side and simply walk up into this valley. When I went back to met Marshall who should have been on top by then, I found that he had gone past my break to the next ravine east and was stopped again. He is from New York City. He has plenty of stamina but he showed on numerous occasions that he has little sense of orientation and routes. I told him about the easy way to the west and I climbed down to retrieve my pack and water while he waited at the bottom of my ravine. We walked west past the first ravine he had tried.The very next one looked interesting to me. First I thought it would be possible, and then I became skeptical. When I got near the top, I found that there was a break filled with big rocks. We could climb through a hole behind a chockstone. Marshall handed me my pack and canteen and I could put them ahead of me through the hole. By this time it was getting later than we liked and we just built a cairn and took some pictures from the highest point.

As I had guessed I would, I liked the views from the top of Steamboat Mountain as well as any in the entire park. Stone Creek and the Middle Granite Gorge were especially fine. The Redwall overhang in the Tapeats tributary containing the main spring was impressive. In Stina Canyon and also in Saddle Canyon we could see streaks of bright green foliage coming down from the base of the Coconino, probably indicating springs. There were numerous creases in the slopes lined with the color of the maples.

I had marked the rim above my chimney climb with a cairn, but we walked down the open valley to the west through the woods to the top of the Toroweap and kept to this level as we went north and then southeast. The walking was relatively easy but it was further and we lost time compared to our approach route. It began to rain on us here and for the next hour we became increasingly wetter. We found the cairns marking the top of our route through the Toroweap, but I overshot the place where we were to descend the Coconino by a few yards. We went down the formation and came to the talus 20 yards southeast of my jacket and Marshall's water and pack. We considered staying on the Esplanade in the junipers leading to Powell Plateau, and I now feel sure we would have made better time if we had done so. We actually went down to the bed of Saddle Canyon over the same route we had used on the approach. Instead of going up the short canyon to the south and climbing out above the Supai, I led the way a short distance into the canyon toward Fire Point and then up above a couple of the Supai walls. I leveled off above a cliff that I thought was above all the barriers in the bed of Saddle Canyon. When we reached the bed, we found that there was one major fall above us, and the only way out was to retrace the route we had been following for 20 minutes. It was just getting dark and both of us were tired and wet. I had thought that we would keep on going after dark, but breaking through the wet brush for several hours didn't appeal. Instead, we located a dry overhang and gathered firewood for the night. Marshall had plenty of dry matches in a can and we stayed rather snug with a small fire warming the one who was lying right in front of it. We took shifts stoking the fire and sleeping. I slept about four half hour stretches, but Marshall made much better use of his hour shifts on our dusty bed.

We still had some of the six quarts of water I had carried from the car, and we also had rain pockets in the bedrock. Food was no problem either since both of us were carrying enough for breakfast. On Sunday morning we backtracked for 20 minutes and climbed to the right height to pass the barrier before going back to the bed. It was routine slogging to get to the car by 10:00 a.m. It was a fine climb and I believe it could be done in a day with the improvements I could now make in our route. As it was, we left the car at six and I was on top by twelve, but I could cut an hour from that time by turning out of Saddle Canyon to the south when we first encountered falls in the Supai. One could head the arm that comes down from Powell Plateau and stay on the saddle from Powell over to Steamboat. We could thus avoid the climb back up from the top of the Redwall and also avoid the brush by staying in the junipers.

Phantom Canyon
[November 25, 1964 to November 26, 1964]

Dick Jacobson and I walked down the Kaibab Trail to Bright Angel Campground in two hours even and took the usual 45 minute lunch stop. He had done the rim to rim to rim hike with considerable walking at night in fine shape, but before long I could see that he wasn't too enthusiastic with the scree slope walking up to the break in the Tapeats northwest of the campground. In walking over to the saddle east of Cheops, we refreshed my memory of the most dense and broadest spread of all sorts of small cacti I know of. Jake got a spike into his shoe. On the Phantom side of the divide, we didn't drop down soon enough and I didn't hit the deer trail as soon as I should have. It comes down to the streambed only a little way upstream from the waterfall, just as soon as there is a passage through the Tapeats cliff. The horse trail from the northeast, from Bright Angel Creek upstream from the granite narrows, comes down to the bed of Phantom at least a quarter of a mile upstream from here. I didn't go up here to check the old campsite under the overhang, but I am sure that this is where it is. We took two and a half hours to reach Phantom Creek from Bright Angel Campground and another half hour to go from here to the bedroll cache a few hundred yards up Haunted Canyon. It was only four o'clock, but we stopped for the night here and enjoyed an early supper.

As usual, my young companion could sleep much later than I and we got an eight o'clock start. Half in the water, we found a rather recently killed deer eaten down to the skeleton, possibly the work of a mountain lion assisted in the clean up by coyotes. There was no water in the bed above the region of seep springs about halfway from the end of Haunted and the fork in upper Phantom. In the shale above the fork, a little water was flowing.

We could see the place where we wanted to try the ascent of the Redwall, about 100 yards to the southeast of the notch which drains the east side of Shiva. I started up the talus too soon and discovered my mistake when it would have meant a long downward detour unless we kept on up to a ledge which led across to the right place. Soon the climbing began and it was about as steep and exposed as I have ever done, and I might have turned back if Jack had expressed concern or if I had been by myself. However, the rock was rough and offered good finger holds when we took our time and looked for them. Good ledges broke the serious climbing about every 12 feet during the steep 60 feet that put us on the easy ledge going over to the notch. When I had looked down from above on my way from the Isis saddle to the Shiva saddle, I couldn't see how one could get up from the lowest part of the notch to the wooded broken level. When we came around the corner now, we were above the difficult part and had a choice of routes out to the top of the Redwall. As was to be expected, I had more trouble descending. At one place I let myself down holding only by my hands and had to pull up again when I couldn't find a foothold. A foot had a half to the north there was a good step below. On the return we went directly down the talus to the shale bed of the west arm of Phantom. This arm ends in a high fall a few hundred yards to the north.

Dick had stabbed his leg on an agave during our climb and this affected his ambition. When we were in the drainage below Buddha Temple on our way back to Bright Angel Creek by the old horse trail, he wanted to leave me and return to Phantom Ranch right down the draw to Phantom Creek. He wanted to wait at the Ranch for me to get through with my trip up the Transept. I had to tell him that I was rather sure he could not reach the bed of Phantom by that route and that the closest way was to continue. He was a bit discouraged Thursday afternoon, especially when he slipped and landed in a small cactus and most of all when he lost his glasses as we were fording Bright Angel Creek. I turned south with him and we slept at the campground two creek crossings north of the Ranch.

On the way out, I met Dewey Wildoner and Donald Davis with whom I had been corresponding. Jacobson got back his pep on Friday and we made it to the rim in good time under a beautiful clear sky. I had met some interesting people and had learned that one can go over to Dragon Creek via the Shiva Saddle.

Down Peach Springs Wash to the Colorado River
[December 30, 1964 to December 31, 1964]

Instead of asking directions to the road down Peach Springs Wash, I just drove off the highway in the general direction and found the good road past the pumping station which ends (at this time) at a gravel pit. When I was ten minutes away from the car, I found the narrow road that goes to the corral. At first I began to go after the car but I changed my mind again and proceeded on foot. It was not my four wheel drive Jeep, and I thought that the extra time for driving back and starting over might not be warranted. At the end of the trip, I watched for the fork where I should have turned off the wide road. It is up on the plateau about one and a half miles from the highway (false now). I noticed that where I parked was 6.1 miles from the highway and 1200 feet lower. If I had taken the right road, I could have driven about two miles farther than I did, but beyond that, the road has rough places that would be better in a power wagon. The best way to get to the corral would be along the bottom of the wash. A road has been bladed along the flats east of the wash, but floods have cut it. Walking time from the gravel pit to the corral was two hours and from there to the river about four and a half. It takes about a half hour along Diamond Creek itself.

Peach Springs Wash was a remarkable contrast to all other approaches to the bottom of the canyon I had ever seen. The route can be described as consisting of four parts and a broad upper bowl where the good road ends. On the road down the wash, you soon come to a fence with a wire strand gate. Here the road goes over a low ridge while the wash detours through a narrow canyon to the west. In a quarter of a mile, you come out into a broad valley surrounded by easy slopes and some exposed cliffs. After a couple miles through this valley, you turn slightly to the right and enter the section that goes nearly straight for mile after mile. This seems to be determined by a great fault.The disparity of the formations seems to indicate that the east wall is several hundred feet higher than the west. I would like to know more about the geology of this area. Igneous rocks on the east seem to overlie more limestone, but before you get to the bed of Diamond Creek, both sides show granite. There are several side canyons which might offer access to the bottom, but mostly the walls are formed by tiers of sheer cliffs. The Redwall near the top has the usual Grand Canyon coloration, but most of the walls are nondescript desert drab. The bed of the wash is as broad as though a big river had been here and the slope is uncanningly uniform for the 17 estimated miles I walked to the river. If any great blocks ever fell from these cliffs, they have either weathered away or have been buried under gravel and small boulders. The final section, the bed of Diamond Creek, was also an evenly graded slope of gravel and small boulders, but it is much narrower, and I believe that floods occasionally cover it from wall to wall.

I could orient myself on the Williams Quad map when I came to the opposed side canyons, Halls to the east and Lost Man to the west. The corral and spring are about three fourths of a mile up canyon from this place. I was looking for cottonwoods to show where the spring is, but there is nothing more luxuriant than a thick grove of mesquite. The spring is just below a small shale ledge and is quite easy to locate since burro trails go right to it from both gates of the corral. At present the gates are wide open, but I could tell that they had been built to allow burros or other stock to go toward the water but the poles would come together and trap the animals in the corral. I saw numerous burros on both days.

On the terrace near the junction of Diamond Creek and Peach Springs Wash, there are mortar free walls of water smoothed boulders. They are placed along the rim of the terrace and appear to be barricades to protect a camp from possible flood waters rather than the foundations for buildings. Lying nearby are a few old weathered two by fours, about three old steel mesh cots, and a very large pile of rusty cans. I recognized a part of a stove. I wonder whether the Farley Hotel was just a tent camp. (I found out later that the hotel was a frame building.) On the return I noticed a better built wall coming out from the cliff about ten minutes walk upstream from this junk at the junction. It is about two and a half feet high and comes out about 30 feet from the wall and ends where the stream has cut into the terrace.

Near the campsite at the east side of Peach Springs Wash, just where it reaches Diamond Creek, I could see where men had cut through the edge of the terrace to get a wagon down to the water in Diamond, but for the rest of the way to the river, I couldn't recognize anything like a trail. One just walks the bed and hops the water numerous times. I watched for Leo Brown's rock pile but I didn't see it.

On the sand dune near the river, there are more signs of former occupation: old two by fours, part of a stove, part of a heavy mining machine, and a lot of pieces of granite core where someone was investigating the rock. There were some very old tin cans and, closer to the river, some charcoal from the camps of river runners.

I reached the river in time to snap a few pictures and get an early supper. They must be trying to replenish Lake Mead because the river was flowing well and was as dirty as it ever was. Tamarisks were growing out of a foot or more of water, and the rapid was kicking up quite a noise.

About the most impressive view of this trip is the sight of Diamond Peak standing at the end of the straight stretch of Peach Spring Wash. It looks like something from Glacier National Park. I wonder whether it has ever been climbed. It is relatively accessible and Diamond Creek supplies plenty of water for camping.

The other thing that impressed me about this route is that with good footing and a straight course, one can cover surprisingly large amounts of territory on foot. Landmarks ahead looked discouragingly far away, but within two or three hours I would pass them.

On the return, I was glad that the road was there for a guide into the correct side canyon and that I could see my own footprints where I needed to leave the road to go to my car. I hadn't remembered the landmarks here as well as I should have.

** On a later trip, we climbed Diamond Peak, but Green found an old bottle at the top with names.

Thunder River
[dates unknown]

When you look west from any of the observation points near the village of Grand Canyon, you see a series of major promontories jutting out alternately from the north and south rims: Point Sublime, Havasupai Point (not to be confused with the Indian Reservation), Powell Plateau, and farthest of all, the Great Thumb Mesa. Beyond the latter lies the interesting Havasupai Indian Reservation with its stream of blue green water and three majestic falls. North, across the Colorado River from the Great Thumb, is a wilder area of great interest.

This is the region drained by Thunder River, a stream just as large as Havasu Creek and a lot swifter and colder. Other tributaries from the north bank such as Kanab Creek carry more water during floods, but for permanent flow, Thunder River, or Tapeats as Powell called it, is the largest stream coming in from the right between the Escalante and the Gulf of California. This is remarkable when one considers that Thunder River flows above ground for only about five miles.

Strange and contradictory reports have been circulated about this stream and the area in general. C. E. Dutton explored the north rim country for the government in 1880. His report devoted over a page to his trip down through the Tapeats Amphitheater to the river. He followed a trail built by gold miners four years before. The only way to make his description conform to the terrain is to conclude that he missed Thunder River entirely and went to the mouth of Deer Creek, three miles farther west. He was very specific about the last few hundred yards where one must dismount and follow a narrow ledge with the creek out of sight below in its crevasse like channel. He even mentions the place where the path is so narrow you have to stoop to get past the overhang in the cliff on the right. It is a precise account of the route from Surprise Valley, through which runs Little Deer Creek, to the bank of the Colorado. The mystery is that he didn't mention striking Deer Creek Falls whose clear water sometimes drops directly into the brown flood of the Colorado.

The present trail to Thunder River goes to the east when one has come down the Redwall. One no longer sees the old trace of a trail to the west into Deer Creek Canyon, or Surprise Valley. This name must arise from the fact that the lower end of the valley seems to be blocked by a ridge which the creek pierces by its strange slit. The fame of Thunder River rests on two things: the fishing and the falls at Thunder Spring. It was stocked sometime in the twenties, and after World War II, fishermen were coming out with tales of 23 inch trout. The spring is near the trail. A considerable volume of water gushes out of a small opening in the cliff at the foot of the great Redwall formation and fans out over a short half cone to drop sheer for a hundred feet. It is more dramatic than the falls in Havasu Creek, for the observer has had no warning. The most water he has seen along the 15 mile trail has been a few stagnant rain pools full of dead bugs. There is a slightly smaller fall 50 yards below the first, but the whole of Thunder Creek from here to its junction with Tapeats is one long chain of cascades. The trail switchbacks down this thousand feet of altitude alternating between catclaw and cactus away from the stream and monkey flowers where the water comes to the edge of the path. The trail was first developed by prospectors, but from its present state of preservation one would guess that it was improved during the depression by the CCC workers.

In 1948 Philip Ferry and Al Schmitz asked Park Superintendent H. C. Bryant whether there was any part of the national park that needed investigation. Doctor Bryant referred them to Thunder River as a place where reliable observers could clear up some conflicting reports. Park Ranger R.E. Lawes and two companions had been on the rim of a side canyon about a half mile away from the source of Tapeats Creek and had come back with the report that it began with a high fall. Jonreed Lauritzen, a writer and contributor to Arizona Highways, had been up the stream, often hip deep in the cold water, and had come back with the story of nothing more exciting than a lot of small springs in the streambed. The names Thunder River and Tapeats Creek are often used synonymously, but the Forest Service map draws a distinction. Below the junction with the tributary from Thunder Spring at the end of the horse trail, it is called Thunder River, and above this point is referred to as Tapeats Creek. Ferry and Schmitz hired a guide and some horses and went in to explore Thunder River without realizing that the argument was over the source of Tapeats Creek and had nothing to do with Thunder Spring. The large scale topographic map of the park is not helpful here. This map, drawn by Matthes and Evans between 1902 and 1923, is a marvelous piece of work up to the park boundaries everywhere except north of Tapeats Creek, where it is completely blank. Thunder Spring is shown, but the larger source, which supplies three fourths of the water in Thunder River, is in the blank area. Forest Service maps of various dates show this spring about two miles east and a mile north of Thunder Spring. Ferry and Schmitz measured the accessible falls below Thunder Spring and noted the width of Thunder River. They went along the bank toward the Colorado until the creek entered its final narrow gorge. They reported their conclusion in an article published by Natural History in 1949 that Lawes was right about there being a good fall at the source. Lauritzen was understandably irked at being regarded as practically blind by men who had not even understood the problem. He replied in Arizona Highways for April, 1950, that the falls at Thunder Spring had been well known since 1905. Ferry and Schmitz hadn't even taken the usual hike to the river along the top of the final gorge and then down a talus from the right to the mouth of the creek, while Lauritzen had struggled all day through deep water to see the source of Tapeats Creek. Lawes had seen a cavern mouth which Lauritzen had missed.

These inconsistencies were finally explained by some Fredonia high school boys in the summer of 1956. Without realizing that there was any argument to settle, they made their way upstream to the source. In climbing around the big springs to the east, Don Finicum, the leader, came on a large cavern mouth about 30 feet wide by 10 feet high. No water was coming out, but there was plenty standing in the corridor farther back. It was now clear that Lawes had seen this cave mouth when it was acting as a spillway at a high stage of the late spring melt. The rush of white water down the steep talus gave the impression of a high fall.

Both Ferry and Lauritzen gave the impression that there is something sinister about this region. Lauritzen passed on a story of a miner who found too much gold in a bar at the mouth of Thunder River to pan by hand. When he returned from Kanab with planking for a sluice box, the river had risen over the bar. In his desperation, he walked out into the river and drowned. Lauritzen fancied something unnatural about this creek, perhaps basing his impression on the great difficulty one has in following it any distance. Ferry passed along his guide's remark that he couldn't see why anyone would want to visit such a gloomy place. Coming back to specific events, we can note that one guide for a fishing party lost several horses that were poisoned by some kind of forage here in the fall of the year. The horse Al Schmitz was riding to cross the creek lost his footing and almost drowned Al. All his color film was lost. When Lauritzen was going up the creek to the source, he lost his footing and his picture record also was ruined.

Ferry's and Lauritzen's articles inspired me to try to reach the source too, but when I got to the end of the trail in 1952 and again in 1956, the water chilled my ardor. I settled for trips to the river and to Deer Creek. As I was leaving the second time, I noted the possibility of following the talus above the gorge. In the fall of 1956, I met Don Finicum at the Flagstaff State College and learned about the cavern near the source. In the summer of 1957 and again at Thanksgiving, I was able to reach the cavern at the source by way of the bench above the creek and had the pleasure of getting the first close pictures of the source.

The two students, Don Finicum and Allyn Cureton, who were with me on the fall trip, found the way back through the dry part of the cave to the large corridor containing the main stream before it finds the cracks down to the surface springs. No one knows how far back under the Kaibab Plateau one could follow this 15 by 20 foot channel. (Now known, 3000 feet.)

Just a week or two earlier a cave explorer from Pittsburgh, George Beck, climbed into Thunder Spring and followed it back, using a rubber boat, without finding the passage becoming any smaller.

This area should continue to grow in popularity. There are two interesting trails down from the rim in the neighborhood of Big Saddle Deer Camp, which is about 50 miles southeast of Fredonia, Arizona. They meet on the Esplanade, the great plateau of fantastic red rocks about a thousand feet below the rim. Consulting a map of the North Kaibab Forest is a must for one who is going in without a guide, and one should carry a gallon of water in the hot season. The falls, the dramatic change from desert to oasis, the fishing, and the caverns all measureless to man will draw more people than the flour gold in the river ever did.

Mile 24.6 and Hot Na Na Wash
[January 22, 1965 to January 23, 1965]

My guest for this trip, Norvel Johnson, thought we were going for just the day. When I told him it was a two day trip, he brought in his sleeping bag, but since he had no knapsack, we decided to sleep at the Jeep. The idea was to see Hot Na Na from the rim on Friday and then go down it as far as possible on Saturday.

We thought we were following the Tanner Wash Quad map carefully when we left the highway a little to the north of the middle of the bay formed by Curve Wash in the Echo Cliffs. What we didn't realize is that there is another turnoff only a quarter of a mile north of the one we used. This is the way we came out of the hinterland on Saturday. Our exit is marked by a large pile of rocks and it gives a more direct access to all the country we were interested in seeing. The way we went in goes west, south, and north and we got thoroughly confused before we headed toward the rim of Marble Canyon. The track we followed goes considerably past the end of the road which we finally identified as the one that is one and a half miles north of Pine Reservoir. It ended near a dam. We entered the draw beyond the dam and after looking down at the Colorado River, decided that we were on the north side of the bay at Mile 24.6. I could recognize Stanton's Marble Pier although it is not as clear from the east rim as it is from the west.

After a lunch where this draw comes to the rim, we proceeded southeast along the rim of the main canyon. We could see that there was a sheer drop below the bed of the main canyon, but I wanted to see whether we could get down to this point, far below the rim at the top of the Coconino Sandstone. About a half mile back from the sheer drop, where the channel turns due south, we were able to climb down through the Kaibab Limestone. The bed soon became red and pitted with water pockets. My geology student companion wanted to call this Hermit Shale, but I convinced him that the regular Hermit Shale had to be much lower. He was convinced when we came to the top of what was clearly Coconino Sandstone. There were a couple of steep drops in the bed before this, but we could get down safely. We came out to the notch formed by the bed with a sheer drop of about 100 feet to the bottom of the Coconino. Below this it would have been simple to go to the river except that I couldn't see a place quite close to the beach. This wash has one advantage over the Tanner Wash as a candidate for the one the Glanton Party used. One can see the river where one is stopped. It must be about 800 feet up to the rim and 1300 or 1400 feet down to the river. There are no deep pools, however, and the walls hem one in for only a short distance near the end. Furthermore, travelers coming north would stay in the valley next to the Echo Cliffs and would very naturally start down the Tanner Wash drainage rather than any over the cut up country to the west.

When we got back to the car, it was still early so we drove back and then north to the road that goes between the Hot Na Na draw and the one that ends at Mile 22. We missed the way again and followed the track farther than it is shown on the Tanner Quad.The Jeep reached another dam about a mile from the rim. When we walked to the brink, I could see that we were two miles south of the mouth of Rider Canyon. We went north along the rim until we got a good view of the barrier rock at Boulder Narrows and then returned to the car. We thought there would be a closer approach to Hot Na Na if we drove back up on the plateau, so we did that before we camped. Just north of a fork I stopped for the night although I could have driven farther north either down a draw or out along the higher land which would have put us closer to Hot Na Na.

We managed to keep warm with two sleeping bags apiece although the night was a little below freezing. The sky was crystal clear and Venus and Mercury, I believe, were impressively closed in the morning sky over the Echo Cliffs. When we got up it was so cold that we just threw some groceries into my pack and started to walk with the intention of eating breakfast when the sun came up.

I thought incorrectly as it turned out, that the next drainage to the east was the beginning of Hot Na Na. I had the idea that we should go out to the rim and look down at the mouth of Hot Na Na before we tried to get down along the bottom. When we came to the first draw, we stayed on the plateau to the west and found a car track which we followed until it gave out. Since this draw was not deepening, we figured that Hot Na Na must be farther east and crossed another draw without finding anything deep enough. We followed the bed of this one clear to the rim of Marble Canyon and found ourselves still downstream from the mouth of Rider Canyon. We were only about a half mile from where we had been on Friday afternoon. We now walked up past the mouth of Rider Canyon and looked down at the mouth of Hot Na Na. We saw that if we could get through the Coconino Sandstone, it would be simple to reach the cliff right above the river. It ought to be easy to walk to the rim of the Supai above the river and return up Tanner or even Salt Water Wash. Since I had promised to get home by 5:30 p.m., at the latest, we knew we would be doing well this time if we could get to the bottom of Hot Na Na and follow it to the Coconino. We were able to get to the bottom opposite where the dotted blue line comes in from the east below the high point marked 5063 on the map. Progress along the bottom was easy. There were a lot of sheep tracks and rather surprisingly a man's shoe prints looking quite fresh. There were probably two men, because we came to four, half grapefruit rinds, a food that we thought unlikely for Navaho sheepherders to be carrying. The only water was very shallow mostly on flat rocks from the recent snow, but we finally came to a real drop in the Coconino Sandstone. It seems to be about 60 feet thick here, and about halfway down there is a deep pool. We assumed that we had to bypass this place along a shelf to the east, but on the return we found a shorter way still to the east. We also saw that we could have walked up the bed and passed the pool on the west side. I had set 11:00 a.m. as my deadline for turning back. About three minutes before that time we came out to where we could see into the wide open canyon. It is quicker and easier to go down Hot Na Na to the Supai rim above the river than it is to do this in Tanner Wash. On the return to the Jeep, we lost our bearings somewhat and expected to see it quite a while before we actually did. We really didn't get off the most direct route and came back to the car using the same track we had followed in the morning. I got home with a half hour to spare. On the return around the pool in the Coconino, I found some very clear fossil footprints about the size of a half dollar.

Hot Na Na doesn't rival Tanner as a candidate for the Glanton Party canyon. It lacks the series of pools and doesn't give one a hemmed in feeling. Besides, there is no place along the bed where a person has to stop and just look ahead.

Marble Canyon at Mile 15.5
[March 7, 1965]

Of the tributary canyons that might have been followed by the Glanton Party, Tanner Wash seemed to meet the description of Chamberlain the best, since it has a narrow bed with pools of water and a channel that would be hazardous during a flash flood. However, the man would have been stopped by a fall in the bed at a place where there is no view of the main canyon of the Colorado. If they had backed up and gone along a steep talus on the east side of the wash, they would have come out where they could see the sweep of Marble Canyon although they would not see the water of the river. If they went to the right along this upper talus, they probably could not get down to the last small cliff above the water. If they had gone along this level to the left (west), they might also conclude that there would be no way down whereas there is a way around a bend further north. Hot Na Na Wash also seemed not to be right since one can proceed smoothly right down to the edge of the cliff immediately above the water. Marston wanted me to check the minor side canyons that come to the river at Mile 15.3 between these two major tributaries.

Gordon Denipah, the finder of the pole platform at Mile 43.3, and his survey crew boss, R.V. Tramall, went with me. We left the car at the end of the road just west of the service station at Bitter Springs and went down the arm that soon reaches the main bed of Tanner Wash where it starts to be steep walled and narrow. One can get out of it to the right farther down where I entered it on the other occasion, but it is a climbing stunt to leave it to the left and this is only possible at one or two places. The Glanton Party would have thought that this deepening canyon would be a logical approach to the river, and their horses would have found the going easy for a couple of miles more. Then there would be no exit without returning to this point, or the lower trail to the east. It would not be easy or natural to switch over into the relatively shallow draw that we proposed to inspect.

A trail leads from the bottom of Tanner Wash to the top of the plateau to the west. We got to the top and then paralleled Tanner. After crossing a swale or two that drained into Tanner, we got to the drainage that goes to the river at Mile 15.5. As we were about to follow it, we met a young Navaho man, Bill Tunney, who was reading a comic book as he watched some sheep. He supposed that we were prospectors, but when he heard that we were just interested in seeing the country, he volunteered the information that if we could go down a 100 foot rope to the bottom of a pit near the start of Hot Na Na Wash, and had flashlights, we could follow a tunnel three miles long to the bank of the Colorado River. At least he said he could show us the pit, but he had just been told that there was a tunnel. His other information wasn't very reliable, because he said that we could not go to the river down Tanner, but we could get down the one we were beginning just now. He did understand our questions, however, and he pointed to the place on the Tanner Wash Quad that was our correct present location. He may have meant that we could get down the cliff with a rope.

In about two hours of walking from the car, we came to the end of the valley. We were about two thirds of the way through the Kaibab Limestone, and there was only about a 40 foot drop to a ledge that could be followed to the west where one could get on down by a talus clear to the rim of the Supai immediately above the river. After lunch at this notch, we had no difficulty in climbing to the plateau to the west only a few yards back from this drop off. In fact, one can leave this valley at will, and there would be no hazard from floods. We followed the rim west to the view into the mouth of Hot Na Na and Rider across the river. It took about two hours to walk back to the car. I was slightly amused that the engineer and surveyor thought we were in Tanner when I knew we were just in the upper end of the draw where we had lunch, above Mile 15.3. He also missed two or three other identifications that day, but he and Gordon were both fine walkers and interesting companions.

Cremation Canyon
[March 13, 1965]

I was slow making up my mind to go because the paper promised more storm. Highway 66 was so hazardous that some drivers were doing less than 35 mph. The road north to the canyon was much better and I reached the Visitor's Center by 10:20 a.m. After a visit during which I learned that Cureton had recently made a solo trip to the river down the Grandview Trail, I started down the Kaibab Trail at 10:40 a.m. right behind three teenage boys from Durango who were going to sleep at Bright Angel Campground. They had to break trail through the drifts. I wish I had taken a picture of the peculiar knife edge cornices along the outside trail.

The first snow and the cloud effect in the canyon made the views fantastic. Across the canyon, the west side of numerous buttes would be in clear sunshine while dense fog clung to the east sides. The updraft from the west would leave a sharp edge of cloud inclined upwards at 45 degree angles for a thousand feet above the tip of the butte. The day was generally sunny, but there were several short snow flurries and the constant shifting of the clouds made the experience unforgettably scenic.

The original plan was to go along the rim of the Redwall east from the South Kaibab Trail, go down through this formation east of Cremation Canyon, and return along the Kaibab Trail. Since the Redwall rim was still snowy, I decided to reverse the order. It was not hard to go down the muddy trail and I was enjoying the trip to the full. It took from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to get from the trail to the end of the east arm of Cremation with about a half hour of that time for lunch. I noticed three caves high in the Redwall on the west wall. The one farthest south is the one we climbed into in 1957 after it had been explored and furnished split twig figurines. I believe Art Lange has also explored the one farthest north, but the middle one seems inaccessible. There were other seemingly inaccessible holes on both walls of this canyon.

There are parallel streambeds in the upper part of this east arm of Cremation separated only by a clay and gravel ridge. I followed the eastern one, and this does continue farther than the other. At one place in this shale streambed, there was a short flowing stream. The streambed came out of the shale just east of the bed. As there was no snow on the slope above, this may be a seep that runs most of the year.

About 100 yards short of the end of this wash below the Redwall, I started up. I had seen deer and burro signs ever since I had left the Kaibab Trail, and I continued noting them up the talus immediately below the Redwall here. There was a place at the top of the talus where I could go almost straight up by using my hands to milder slopes that led without further chance taking to the level of the figurine caves across the canyon. If I had been more daring or skillful, I might have gone on across a steeply sloping part of the Redwall. There were many little nubbins of projecting rock and a few bushes growing in the cracks. Since I have resolved not to press my luck and get in a fix that might induce the shakes, I decided to turn back. Scholing and Todd (?) came down somewhere near here, but perhaps they used the ravine that opens to the north on the other side of the promontory. I knew I was taking too long so I couldn't scout more places. For over 20 minutes, I had to look for the place to get down from this upper talus or rather I was trying to find an easier spot for the descent. Finally, I went down six feet from where I had come up.

The mud and snow made the trail back rather hard. I needed two and a half hours for the last three and a half miles. Eight years ago this would have seemed much easier. (March 8, 1969: 1 hour and 55 minutes for this three and a half mile leg, also mud and snow.)

Black Water Canyon (Oak Canyon on the Navaho Mountain Quad)
[March 20, 1965]

The occasion was the third trip of the college hiking club to Rainbow Bridge under the management of Jay Hunt and my sixth trip. Some of the students went in from Rainbow Lodge, some over the top of the mountain with Hunt, and others came in by boat from Wahweap. Those that walked in got to go out by boat. Everything worked out all right although I had predicted that the party would have to retreat the way they had gone up and then would be quite late in arriving at the bridge by one of the two regular trails. They were two hours slower this year than they had been last year with two girls along, but apparently their feet were stopped by a buried crust in the snow just about as deep below the surface as we stepped last year. Cureton kicked his foot down through this crust and still hadn't found the bottom at four and a half feet.

Since I was more eager to see something I hadn't seen before than I was to see whether I could defy good sense and make my way through the deep snow, I took the north trail around the base of the mountain. We had left Flagstaff about 6:00 p.m. Friday evening and reached Navaho Mountain Trading Post about 9:30 p.m. After some palaver, two students went with me by car four and a half miles farther north to the brow of the hill. They drove the car back to Rainbow Lodge where the non mountain climbers spent a cold night out. I walked down the road by moonlight toward the beginning of the trail for an hour and turned in. It was a surprisingly cold, clear night and by three I was wide awake and cold on the underside where my down bag was compressed. After due consideration, I exercised my freedom as a solo hiker and got up and walked for over an hour. The moonlight on the snowfields of upper Navaho Mountain and the bare sandstone below was unforgettably beautiful. Some features of the route seemed unfamiliar and there was a little difficulty in keeping to the trail. About 4:00 a.m. I inflated the air mattress and stopped to sleep again, but by 5:30 a.m. I was wide awake once again.

Soon after I started on at 5:40 a.m. I came to Balk Rock Canyon and had the assurance of the distinctive route down the east side that I was still on the regular route. The mountains out to the northeast were unusually clear in the early sunlight. I was still not sure of the identification. The two domes on the left had steep sides, but the range a little farther to the left seemed higher, farther away and more snowy. From the shape of the summits, I decided that this range must be the La Sals and that the two on the right were two sections of the Abaho Mountains. This doesn't account for the Henrys, so I am not sure about this geography yet. The north side of Navaho Mountain was covered solidly with snow, except for cliffs, to within a few hundred feet above the trail. The creeks were running less water than they had last year in February and even in November if I could remember correctly.

After only about two and a half hours of sleep Friday night, I tried sacking out in the sun at 9:00 a.m., but my habits were too strong and after a ten minute nap I was wide awake. I reached Black Water Creek by 10:30 a.m. and turned down it for a short way before an early lunch. The water that is flowing at the trail crossing soon disappears. The arm of the creek that comes in about 15 minutes walk down from the trail crossing had a nice flow of water that kept the creek flowing above ground for over a mile. For the rest of the bed I covered, possibly about two miles, there was water only in infrequent standing pools.

The canyon is a beauty. First there are views out to the prominences and back to Navaho itself. Then there are short stretches of narrows that open again on open areas where the walls slope back at a gentle angle. Then the walls close in again and finally form the narrowest of narrows. In a place or two, I lacked only a foot in being able to touch both vertical walls with my finger tips. I was hoping to have time before my 1:30 p.m. deadline to either reach the lake or the spot that had stopped Hunt, Cureton, and Earl in November, 1965, when they had gone down this canyon by mistake. At 1:15 p.m. I came to the place. A couple of chockstones had formed an eight foot step in the bed. Perhaps I could have climbed up the slope to the shelf on the left, but after going along it for 40 yards, I would have had to jump down a six foot wall which would have stopped me from returning. This was the objective and I returned feeling that I had seen a most interesting canyon. It would be absolutely insane to go through this lower narrow part in flash flood weather, but it seemed about as interesting as Anasazi Canyon. If one dropped a short log over the chockstone, he could go around the next bend, but Cureton found more obstructions below when they let him down the six foot wall with a rope. I got back up to the trail crossing in about two and a half hours, so I figured I had been down canyon about four miles.

There were signs of a horse trail in the first mile below the main trail and I noted an old ramada about five minutes walk north. There were several fault cracks that came down to the bed before the real narrows began, and I wondered how many places there were where a man could enter this canyon.

There were no signs of sheep, horses, or man yet this season to the west of Black Water Canyon. I wasted no time entering the right crack where the straight drainage begins that finally drops into the east arm of Bridge Canyon. At the end of this fault crack, I wasn't positive which route was right, but after following my hunch for a little while, I came to the trail construction with the switchbacks down to the brook in the east arm of Bridge Canyon.

About ten minutes after reaching the brook, I noted a triangular mouthed cave in the sandstone across the creek on the right. It went back about 35 feet, but there was a sand terrace at the very back caused by floods, so there was no chance that it was ever occupied.

The park people have improved the trail from the boat landing up the canyon to Rainbow Bridge and there was not a scrap of trash to be seen. Boats now moor about 100 yards above the narrows. They even have a house trailer parked on the terrace, and a foot bridge takes you from the west side across to the trail on the east.

I thought I was thoroughly familiar with the scenery along the lake back to Wahweap, but I got a greater impression of its grandeur from the boat than I had when I had floated down the river two or three hundred feet lower beneath the rims or had flown a couple of thousand feet above the rim. Lake Powell is a much more scenic than Lake Mead as the Alps are more scenic than the Sahara.

Clear Creek
[April 15, 1965 to April 16, 1965]

The most unusual thing about Clear Creek at this time was the number of visitors. It seems to be coming into its own after all those years of solitude. I met two family groups and 31 Sierra Clubbers. I had known John Ricker and I became acquainted with Bill Poston, Marshall Eaton, and especially Tom Pillsbury, another college teacher but one who has independent means and still teaches chemistry. Several of them made the effort to get up early and be ready to go with me up to Cheyava Falls even though they weren't supposed to be ready to leave the area until 5:00 p.m., while I intended to start back for Bright Angel Campground quite a bit sooner.

I was rather disappointed in the small flow out of the cave at Cheyava Falls. At this time of year I had hoped for a picture such as the Kolbs had taken. Tom and Marshall went with me on up the long arm of Clear Creek to see how it ended in the Redwall. One of the visitors, Francis Smith, had been up the day before, but we finally passed his last tracks just below some large rocks in the bed. A more serious block at a fall in the lower Redwall was passed on the east side up a talus filled crack where we had to crawl under a chockstone. Here Marshall decided that he could use a rest, but Tom and I kept on. About ten minutes farther we came to a couple of chockstones effectively barring the passage. They were only about seven feet in diameter, but the cracks between them were harder to start up because they were wider at the bottom and the rocks themselves were smooth. I wedged my body into the likeliest of the three cracks. Although there were almost no rough spots to push against, I kept on trying and made it up an inch at a time. Tom decided he was not that agile and waited and watched while I went around a corner and up a wet slope. (Tom has done climbs that have baffled me.) I then came back into sight from below as I climbed up a steep pitch that had a lot of good holds. Above was a worse slope, gentle but rather smooth. Using a few small holes for toes and heels, I was soon up and could walk ahead above the Redwall. There was no time to investigate the upper formations for a route to the rim. (Bob Dye has been down there from the rim.)

Ranger Bailey had seen something in the side canyon to the west a little south of Cheyava that he thought was a natural bridge like Goldwater's or Hartman's. I looked up here in the forenoon without seeing anything. After climbing up over halfway from the bed of Clear Creek to the base of the Redwall in this side canyon, I saw that there was a large block, convex both above and below, lying across the vertical walled ravine. There seemed to be less space beneath the block than the thickness of the block. It would take time and care to negotiate the cliff below this place and I didn't get a close picture. (Later I went up and there isn't even a block with a hole beneath.)

Redwall rim south of Shiva Temple
[April 18, 1965]

Allyn Cureton joined me at Bright Angel Campground. We proceeded along the river near the telephone lines and then started up the granite. A number of people along the trail on the south side of the river were quite interested in our progress, steady at first and then slow and careful towards the top. We had done this years ago, but we still don't feel sure we have the best route, high on the right until we were just below a cliff and then across. We had previously gone ahead to the west on the shale, but this time I preferred to go up on the large blocks and talus of quartzite to minimize the shale. Beyond Cheops Pyramid, we went down the north side of the island of Tapeats and got into the draw that Kolb used as a route up from the river into Trinity drainage. We turned up to the northwest and finally got above the Tapeats and reached the rather deep wash that goes into Trinity. On my former trip up between Shiva and Isis, I had gone down into this and across, but Allyn had followed it to its junction with Trinity. He was pretty sure we would find water near the junction. There were several nice pools connected by a tiny stream. We filled the canteens and even took a bath.We then proceeded upstream to the place where I had formerly camped, at the very top of the Tapeats. Here we found the two small rainpools I had found in August, a good 45 minutes walk upstream from the next water. We stopped here by 5:30 p.m.

In the morning it took us almost two hours to walk to the top of the saddle between Isis and Shiva Temples. I remembered correctly that the very top needed some use of the hands. After putting both lunches in my almost empty pack with Allyn taking water for both of us, we started the tedious process of walking the top of the Redwall. About half the time we could find a deer or bighorn sheep trail, for we saw some droppings and tracks that indicated bighorn as well as deer. In three of the bays at the rim of the Redwall, there were rain pockets holding less than a quart of water apiece, and in the bay below the middle of Shiva, we found a very slow seep running. None of these could be trusted during a dry season. After three hours of careful stepping, we reached the saddle between Shiva and Osiris. At the hollow just before we reached this divide, we could have gone up the Supai and probably the Coconino towards Shiva. I believe this is the uphill route used by the deer to reach the top of Shiva.

After a late lunch at the saddle, we went out to the angle projecting northwest from Osiris Temple and took pictures lining up objects rather well with those in Stanton's view. We also went farther south until I got a good look at the Redwall leading to the notch between the Tower of Ra and Osiris Temple. The Stanton Party couldn't have gone up here. They could have gone up all the Supai except the last cliff forming the top of Ra and they probably could have done that well on Osiris also. I think the picture shows the Redwall rim considerably lower than the camera. From the line up with the knolls below at the Tonto level, they were probably on Osiris. (SHK went down here, also Don Davis.) Starting from the last water up Dragon Creek would give us a better chance for repeating Stanton's hike on Osiris.

On the way back to our packs, we drank all the water we could get out of the midget rainpools. We had thought that we would have time to get our packs down the Redwall into Phantom Creek before dark, but dusk was descending when we arrived at the break I had checked last Thanksgiving. We were careful not to drink copiously but we found that we had enough for light meals both at night and in the morning. It took us two hours to get down the risky part. Allyn led and he practiced without his pack before proceeding. At one place I handed the packs to him, but the rest of the time they were on our backs. At two places I threw down my unrolled sleeping bag before coming down with the lighter pack.

We now had some extra time so we spent it going up two arms of Phantom Canyon. It becomes more spectacular as it closes in. At one place, two room sized blocks are leaning against each other across the streambed. At another, there is a 20 foot fall with a huge boulder wedged into the narrow slot above. A deer trail bypasses this, but you finally come to a dead end in a peculiar chamber about 30 feet wide at the bottom. The curving walls above seemed to be no more than ten feet apart and thus almost shut out the sky. A series of falls bring the snow melt and storm waters down from the basin, but on the present occasion, there was almost no flow. There are also several caves high in the walls of this most interesting gorge.

We returned to the Bright Angel Campground by the high trail east of Cheops Pyramid but not before locating the overhang at the beginning of the trail to upper Bright Angel Creek. There are still some cow chips here so many years after the cattle have left. Long parts of the trail out are covered by slides and I think it is harder to find them than it was several years ago. A few cacti were in bloom and we saw several Mariposa tulips, but the best flowering is still to come. We noticed more birds than usual.

Down the South Kaibab Trail then above the Redwall to Cremation Canyon
[May 9, 1965]

Norvel Johnson and Allyn Cureton came with me and after checking in at the Visitor's Center, we were starting down the South Kaibab Trail by 8:30 a.m. We left the South Kaibab Trail in the Supai east of O'Neil Butte below the continuous cliffs but far enough south so that we had to choose a route to get through to the rim of the Redwall below. I noticed that it took the three of us two hours to go along the rim to the head of the east arm of Cremation Canyon. On checking with my report of the trip on February 2nd, 1963, I see that this time wasn't too much slower than the two and a half hours I needed to go by myself from the South Kaibab Trail around the end of Cremation. On the present occasion, Allyn and I had time for a few pictures while waiting for Norvel to catch up. We were able to find the deer trail about one quarter of the way. The day was cool and bracing. We sat down in the shade of a pinyon at the top of the Redwall for lunch, but before I was through, I wanted to move into the sun. This time I was sure where we should try to go down, the notch where the Cremation Fault meets the Redwall. At my suggestion, Jerry Rassner and Dick Jacobs had done this last week. We found that it is a simple walk down. If one didn't move from the main bed to the broken region to the left, it might be somewhat difficult.

At the bottom, I led the others up the wash to the place where I had found the seep earlier this spring. It was now completely dry even after our wet April. We had found several rain pools and a seep active along the rim of the Redwall on our way over from the South Kaibab Trail. There was even a very slow seep in the lower Redwall in the fault ravine we had descended. I believe there had been some rain here only two days before.

After our detour up the wash, we left the base of the Redwall descent at 1:00 p.m., an hour and a half sooner than the party the week before. I predicted that we would be on the South Kaibab Trail near the lower end of the white switchbacks by 2:30 p.m. and to the rim by 4:30. We left the wash in Cremation before we came to the Tapeats bluff on the west. There were acres of Mariposa tulips along here although some were beginning to fade. In fact, the notable part of the trip was the profusion of wild flowers. A certain shrub above the Redwall was covered with white blossoms, and many other flowers were blooming along the Tonto Platform.

When we were leaving the wash, Allyn decided that he would like to see the Colorado River at close range in its high stage. He left us about 1:30 p.m. and I predicted that he could reach the rim by 5:30. With all of his records in mind, he thought he could do quite a bit better. He crossed the river to go to the bank at Bright Angel Creek, and on the way back up the white switchbacks, he encountered two bighorn sheep, a ram and an ewe. They were in no hurry to get away and he had time to get his camera out of his pack and take some rather close views. He reached the car just five minutes before my predicted time. The day was cool and the trail was free of dust and mud, and I reached the car by 4:05 p.m. My conclusion is that it is a little faster to reach the caves in the east arm of Cremation by way of the South Kaibab Trail than to go along the Redwall rim. I would still like to go over to Lyell Butte, and the route would be along the rim of the Redwall and over the saddle south of Newton Butte It would take more than one day (false) and you would have to carry water for the full time unless it had rained recently.

The Transept and Ribbon Falls Creek (Upper Ribbon Falls)
[May 29, 1965 to May 31, 1965]

Doug Shough and I went down to Bright Angel Campground between 5:45 and 7:45 p.m. and had a good evening that was enlivened by some scouts whose leaders were staying at Phantom Ranch while the boys were running loose beside the river and anywhere else. In fact, for the entire weekend, the place was alive with scouts, most of whom couldn't resist jumping on the suspension bridge even though they could see that something was breaking the bolts out of the boards.

Doug and I were on our way by 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning. The air was bracing and we made good progress until we came to the heliport, 1.5 miles south of Ribbon Falls. Doug thought there might be something wrong with his feet. When we looked, he had about the most extensive assortment of blisters I have seen on one person at one time, but fortunately they weren't deep. I was short of tape, but the chopper pilot gave us quite a bit. I took some for possible future use.

I went on while Doug made up his mind whether to proceed or not. He caught up with me while I was eating a snack at Ribbon Falls. Then he went back south while I went on past Cottonwood Camp to the Transept. Crossing Bright Angel Creek in its high stage was a bit of a problem. I kept my shoes on since I have learned that bare feet in the swift water are no good. I picked a shallow place and made it all right.

The Transept is a beautiful canyon with a lot of verdure, but at most places there is a clear terrace for better walking on one side or the other. I found these improvements more consistently coming back than I did going in. The walking time to the fork at the upper end was two hours going in and one hour and 40 minutes coming out. About 15 minutes from the mouth, I was surprised to find a horseshoe. The little stream was flowing well, especially from a spring two thirds of the way from the mouth to the upper forks. There were wet places on the cliffs where snow was still melting, but about three fourths of the way to the upper end there was a nice pair of falls coming down big jumps in the Redwall. Both of the main forks also had neat falls. Water ouzels and canyon wrens added charm to grandeur.

Donald Davis had climbed the Redwall at the ends of both forks, but he had warned me that I might find the west fork a little severe. As I bypassed a couple of small drops in the bed, I muttered to myself, "Purely routine." Then I came to a broken angle in a wall to the east of a waterfall. As I carefully found my way up here, I thought that this must be the hard part. At the top of this, I really saw the trouble. I picked the place where I thought I could go the highest, to the east of a travertine lined fall. I got to a shelf above a fir tree, but here the handholds seemed more precarious. Since I value my remaining years more than my rock climbing reputation, I went back down and figured that Donald Davis had just joined a not too select club, the climbers who are out of my class.

The longer, east branch was a good deal easier, but not too easy to be dull. There is a minor forking at its end and the easiest way is on a projecting angle between the forks. The Supai Formation above didn't give me any encouragement. I rather think that there would be a way through it somewhere out of my sight to the west.

There is a fresh rock slide near the angle between the main forks. I went from the west to the east branch fifty feet above the bottom and had seen what might be deer trails going up. It was getting late in the day, but I tried getting up the Redwall here. Again I could get up to within 30 feet of the top by testing all holds, but finally there was a place where a projection stopped me. A good climber could have gone on, but I don't take chances. I got back through the fir and maples of the upper end of the Transept and crossed the creek to the North Kaibab Trail eight hours after I had started in and had time to get down to the Ribbon Falls Campground by 7:00 p.m. Here I met Bob Bell and Bill Burkhardt of Phoenix and learned that the Sierra Club had passed that way about five.

With an early start at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, I thought I could see what I wanted above Ribbon Falls and still catch the Sierra Club at Phantom Ranch since Jerry Foote had said that they would eat lunch there at one. I began by allowing three hours for this side trip, but when I finally saw that I might hope to reach the source of the water by a slight extension, I ended by making it three and a half. The valley above Ribbon Falls impressed me more than it had 13 years ago. The trail is still in fair shape. I noted the Indian ruins to the south of the falls under the overhang before I started up the juniper covered slope that takes you above the cliff to the south. There is a fair deer trail here and I could follow it around toward the stream. The valley above Upper Ribbon Falls is one of the most interesting in the whole Grand Canyon. There doesn't seem to be a prayer of a chance to climb the Redwall anywhere. To the north of the upper falls, I noted an interesting looking overhang above the lowest fifth of the Redwall, just where some caves are found. This one has a feasible approach and I first thought I would use my time to inspect it, but when the light got better, I concluded that it is probably nothing more than an overhang.

The bed of the creek and the level ground on both sides are more densely overgrown in this valley below the Redwall than they are anywhere else I have been in the whole canyon. Travel is impassible in or near the creek so I went up on the south facing slope. This was more open but it was steep and covered with shale, so my progress was slow. First I thought I would turn back when I had determined which of the upper arms carried the water, but after I had seen that it was the one from the west, I went on until I found the bed dry. The highest spring is very minor, just a small pool in the middle of the boulder bed. The dense cottonwoods below for some distance seem to mark additional small springs. I went back on the north facing slope and found the travel among the junipers much easier. This upper upper valley is a fine place to get the feeling of being in a remote area while you can actually be down to the main trail in an hour. Two thirds of the way from the mouth of the Transept to the upper forks, I noted an area on the northeast side that might give a good climber another route to the top of the Redwall. I got back to Phantom Ranch by 11:15 a.m. and met a couple of the Sierra Club group, but Jerry Foote and most of them had already taken off for Indian Gardens. I had kept to my schedule much better than he had to his, but I didn't blame him because the day was getting warm and I could see the point of getting out of the inner gorge before two. Allyn Cureton found me eating at the campground and we walked out together. He had missed me up at Ribbon Falls. He had come halfway down on Saturday evening and was looking for me on Sunday. In addition, he was going to spend Monday and Tuesday going through Sycamore Canyon with Dr. Hunt and some scouters.

Coconino west of Cape Royal and the rim above Clear Creek
[June 2, 1965]

When Norvel Johnson and I reached the north rim on June 1st, we stopped in and paid our respects at the Ranger Headquarters. We got acquainted with Robert L. Peterson, the ranger in charge, and also Jim Richardson and Ranger Timmons. We further visited with Timmons and a seasonal ranger, Jim Dyer, who knew me slightly since he is a Flagstaff College student. Peterson and Richardson told us that they had sighted a natural bridge or arch right on the rim of Clear Creek in the area above Cheyava Falls when they were observing the falls from an airplane. They were going to walk the rim sometime and photograph it and get a better location. We got permits for the one day effort to see about going down from the rim above Clear Creek to the top of the Redwall and also for a five day trip from the rim west of Point Atoka into the Chuar Basin.

Since this was Norvel's first visit to the north rim, we stopped at the viewpoints starting at Point Imperial. There was no snow left around the campground, but it almost covered the ground on the north slopes in the woods around Point Imperial. There were still some snowbanks below the Coconino in the shade. I tried to locate the Powell inscription on a tree at Point Imperial but without success. Perhaps it was on a tree that was removed to make way for the widened parking pavement a few years ago. At Vista Encantada, it was very simple to see the window through the south buttress of Alsap Butte. In the morning the bright surface beyond contrasts with the dark cliff.

At the next viewpoint, formerly called Two Rivers Junction, we observed the place to come down through the Coconino west of Point Atoko. After taking in the sights at Cape Royal, I got the urge to see what sort of descent Donald Davis had made through the Coconino west of Cape Royal. It was easy to follow his directions and go to the bottom of the ravine below Cliff Spring. A short distance east of the mouth it is quite easy to scramble down through the Toroweap and most of the Coconino. About the middle of the Coconino, there is a ledge where one can have three choices: a possible friction descent with no good holds for several yards, a climb down a narrow crack, or a route distinctly separated from the first two to the west. On the way down, I left my pack above the crack and used it, but on the return, Norvel and I went up west of here and I had to come back down a short way to pick up the pack. There is no further difficulty until one reaches the very bottom of the Coconino. The only way here involves trusting to friction alone to get on a steeply sloping step possibly four feet above the good step below. With a rope it would be easy and safe. Davis warned me about this spot, but I couldn't see myself getting back up, and Norvel had shown himself a poorer climber than I the night before at the little ruin just below the rim at the southeast corner of the north rim campground. We gave this place up and returned to the car. I wish now that I had looked around for a loose tree trunk or had considered the possibility of building a step from loose rocks. Except for this one place of about eight feet, this descent is routinely simple.

We returned to the main project, try to get down to the top of the Redwall at the end of the long arm of Clear Creek. In order to intercept the bridge that Peterson had seen from the air, we parked at the lot 1.4 miles north of Cape Royal and headed west until we hit the rim. As luck would have it, within a couple hundred yards we came to the bridge or window. It has a good shape, but the hole is only about 35 feet in width.

There is no deep valley leading to the drop off into Clear Creek. We did succeed in getting down through the upper cliff a bit southeast of the end of the gorge. A deer trail seemed to lead down to the south, but we soon found that there is no chance to get through the Coconino, and the Supai also looked formidable. (Bob Dye succeeded one and a half miles South of the head of the canyon on the east side.) We had to give up. Since there was still quite a bit of time left, we went out to visit the Indian ruin on the promontory northeast of the parking. This time I used the little tree.

Ascent of Bridger's Knoll and Tapeats, Stone, and Deer Creeks
[June 3, 1965 to June 7, 1965]

I had been intending to spend these five days in the Chuar Creek area, but after Norvel and I had spent 15 minutes going down the steep hillside toward the break in the Coconino through the wind felled aspens and other impediments, it occurred to me that Norvel and I might both have a better time going to Thunder River where there is a good trail. He accepted the change of plans with alacrity. I had the feeling that fighting brush and making our way from ledge to ledge on Gunther Castle would not be a fair initiation for a person who was just getting the feel of Grand Canyon exploration. We notified the rangers of our change of plans and headed for the beginning of the Thunder River Trail at the Indian Hollow Campground.

We left the rim at 1:00 p.m. and by three we had arrived at the good campsite under the overhang near the wash that comes from between Monument Point and Bridger's Knoll. It has been used considerably since there is even a small heating stove there with quite a bit of stovepipe. Someone even left a bottle of detergent. It was looking more and more like rain, so we decided to hole up under such good protection. The immediate threat passed and we deposited our packs under shelter and took a side tour down the ravine. There had been a little water in a couple of pockets near the trail, but lower in the bed there was water running. This water from a ravine to the east could not be trusted after a drought. We bypassed one big drop in the bed and finally came to another. The Redwall was still out of sight below when we managed to scramble to the top of the Esplanade. It was now after five o'clock so we went back to camp.

On our way the next morning, Friday, we took time out to climb Bridger's Knoll. The Coconino was no problem when we went to the obvious place, a ramp about in the middle of the west side, but the Toroweap called for hands as well as feet. There were two or three closely associated routes near the north end. We left the first cairn on top and got some impressive views.

In reworking the trail recently, they have shortened it by taking it from the Esplanade almost directly down to the place where the switchbacks into Surprise Valley begin. When we were below the main Redwall down the switchbacks, I suggested to Norvel that we test the route above the two big slump blocks of Redwall. He followed the trail and I cut across to a place on the trail where it climbs some to get down to Thunder Spring. I needed about 20 minutes to do this and then waited about five for him to arrive. A trail across this route would save another five. We were as thrilled as ever by the sight of Thunder Spring, and it seemed to be flowing at least half again as much water as I have ever seen on my other four trips. The trail, about a third of the way from the bottom of the inner gorge of Tapeats Canyon where it used to be slightly moist, was now under several inches of water.

Almost directly above this place, high in the Bright Angel Shale, there is a spur trail that I once thought to be the way to the Colorado River. In 1951, when I tried to use it as an approach to the Colorado, I soon lost it. On the recent trip, I finally saw its meaning. After the first fine view of the falls, the former trail went to the south away from the creek and reappeared where the spur is still seen. The present trail seems more precarious in places, but it gives finer views of the cascades. We met three men from a Bus Hatch river party coming up to see the falls. They told us that there was a safe way to cross Thunder Creek near the bottom where it broke into three channels with trees lying across the two larger ones. They said that Tapeats Creek could be crossed with a little difficulty just above where Thunder River joins it.

Tapeats Creek was so high that part of the trail was under eight inches of water. We took off our packs and pushed them ahead of us over a rock under an overhang.

We had eaten an early lunch up near Thunder Spring in the shade at the end of a spur trail leading to the improved sleeping platform under the overhanging rock. It was only noon when we got down near Tapeats Creek. Almost on the impulse of the moment, I suggested going over to see the cave at the source of Tapeats with the hope of getting the first close up pictures of water coming out of the cave itself. Norvel and I crossed on the logs and scrambled up the north bank intending to climb to the top of the Tapeats at the break I had used in 1957 with Dale Hall. Before we got there, we saw another inviting ravine that led up quite a distance. About halfway up, this stopped cold and we had to climb back down. At this point, Norvel decided to forgo this part of the expedition. I didn't have to descend clear to the creek to reach the right break, the ravine opposite the place where the trail comes down to the water about two thirds of the way down the inner gorge. In 1957 I didn't regard this as anything out of the ordinary rock scramble, but Dale Hall was rather impressed when we came out on top. This time, I seemed slower and more intent on finding the easier way. Towards the top, I went into a crack and braced against the wall. I am rather sure I marked the approach above with a small cairn before, but I couldn't see it and put a rock on top of a barrel cactus and also stood a slender rock upright in a crack of a larger rock a little higher on the slope above. It now took me an hour and a quarter to walk, keeping fairly low, to the angle into the source canyon. In another hour, I was taking pictures at the cave. On the return, I avoided the tangle along the creek and the steep ravines that bar progress along the lower west slope by going high up near the base of the Redwall. Progress is better here.

At the campground, we met two Flagstaff men and a high school boy; Father Turner, Earl Sanders, and David Fronske. After a late supper that was slowed by quite a rain storm, we had a pleasant evening visit with the other party.

On Saturday we were ready for the main event, a visit to Stone Creek. Norvel had scouted part of the way to the river Friday afternoon and he knew how to lead me to the one tree bridge across Tapeats Creek. We had to go away from the creek twice along the shale ledges where the footing called for great care before we got to the bridge. On the east side, the trail goes over some old rock slides as well as furnishing level walking along the terrace where Indians used to farm. When you come to the place where the creek enters the final gorge to the Colorado River, you would almost surely lose the trail. I couldn't see how a trail could stay below next to the creek, so I led Norvel up higher with no trail at all. When we got near the river, we saw a good trail below and found that it had been down there all the time. On the return, we followed it and had to do a couple climbs up ledges. In low water, you would just wade through the water to pick up this part of the trail.

Unfortunately, I hadn't intended to include Thunder River in our trip at this period and hadn't brought along Beck's sketch map locating the Wayside Inn and the other ruins. We should have slowed down to look at things as well as the cavers had. We took some pictures and I thought we were using our eyes to spot Indian ruins, but we missed them all. It took us about an hour and 35 minutes to get from Tapeats to Stone Creek and only an hour and 10 minutes for the return when we were intent on getting back to our camp before dark. If Beck had shown more different falls, his sketch would be more useful. We went up the creekbed although I was sure there would be an obstruction. Pat had told me something about a bypass to the east, but I wanted to see what sort of difficulty he had in mind. We soon saw the Twin Chimneys and to the east below there is a fall lined with travertine that stopped us. From a distance, it had looked as if we could get up a ravine just west of here, but the lower part is impossible (others have done this before). We went back perhaps a third of the way to the entrance at the top of the diabase and started up to the east. Before long we found a good deer trail which led us to the southeast to a break in the cliff. If we had climbed a little higher here we could have looked down into Galloway Canyon across a rather slim ridge.

To judge by Beck's sketch, we should have gone down into the creekbed as soon as we had passed the Twin Chimneys, but I thought that there might be further barriers and I led Norvel along the contour until we were definitely in the valley right below the spring. It was fairly easy to go up the bed beyond the last water. All the canyon country below the highest rims were a mass of wild flowers, but especially in upper Stone. One dripping wall was covered with maidenhair ferns, primulas, and columbines.

When we returned to where we had come down into the streambed, I crossed to the west side to examine a platform next to the shale cliff. There was a little charcoal here but no other signs of ruins. According to the way I read the sketch, these are in the middle valley that we avoided for fear of more barriers.

The return to camp was uneventful. Again we passed a little running water in the two main indentations along the river. There is a place as you get rather close to the mouth of Tapeats Creek where a deer trail obviously follows a narrow ledge above a shear drop into the river. We regretfully detoured to a higher level where the footing was poor but where you could think that one slip wouldn't be your last.

At the campground that was vacated by the Flagstaff men, we found three more, John Harrington, Howard Booth, and Henry Morgan. They has just succeeded in getting down Tuckup Canyon to the Colorado River, although they had needed a rope in one place. I told them about going to Stone, the source of Tapeats Creek, and over to Deer Creek. They asked about getting to Deer Creek along the river. I told them that Dr. Ricker had given this up, but only from the start at the river level below Deer Creek Falls. I suggested that they start along the bench at Tapeats mouth and then walk up the ramp where the beach gives out about halfway to Deer Creek. On Sunday they did this after a poor start. Not knowing the proper way to reach the river beach, they started up too soon and almost came to the level of Surprise Valley. They got to the beach by going down Bonita Creek (the wash that drains Surprise Valley) although they needed the rope at one place. The feasibility of the rest was never in doubt, although at the very end they went along the ledge on the east side of the Deer Creek Gorge matching the well used ledge on the west. Here they had to get down on hands and knees for a few yards. ( I would have preferred walking up over the low ridge into Deer Creek valley.) They are a tough and cheerful gang. They were swimming below the fall when I met them again and they seemed very unconcerned about arriving back at the campsite rather late. Anytime before midnight would be fine. They returned by the standard route up to Surprise Valley and down the trail to Tapeats. The following day they planned on visiting Stone Creek.

Norvel and I went over to Deer Creek on Sunday by the standard route. The trail was just as clear as I remembered it being in the fall of 1957, but I had forgotten how it went down after the gently sloping valley gives way to the first steep pitch where the bed is cluttered with room sized rocks. On the return we found that the trail is high above the bed along the south side. When this steep part comes to the actual cliff above Dutton (Vaughn) Spring, the trail swings across to the north where it crosses the shale on a narrow ledge and then is almost lost in a big rockslide.

This time I was aware that there are Indian ruins in the valley, and when the trail swung to the base of the shale cliff near some platforms, I looked and made out the outlines of rooms. There was a little charcoal, and Norvel found a bit of obsidian. Around to the north about 50 yards are two well preserved storage bins.

We had needed three hours and 45 minutes to get over from Tapeats Creek and now we loafed over a leisurely lunch and soak in the creek. About 2:15 p.m. we started off to see a few things. We went above the water in the bed and then looked into the storage bins. Now Norvel decided to skip the visit to the fall down by the river since his knee was giving him some trouble. I went by way of the slope west of the creek to see whether I would agree with Don Finicum that the terrace he saw had an artificial retaining wall. Following a deer trail, I found it all right and a little to the south I saw an Indian ruin or two. The terrace was of the same age as the ruin and probably formed the base for more housing. When Harrington, Booth, and Morgan were leaving they came up to see this area with me, and between us we found many more dwellings. They were so thick that they must have looked like a pueblo, a regular village. This is on the west slope above the creek and about a quarter of a mile north of the beginning of the gorge. Another observation that I hadn't made before, but that I had been told to watch for, were horse skeletons. I saw two, one of them right where we camped at the end of a passage through the willows that came from the end of the trail over to the creek. Norvel and I agree that camping next to Tapeats Creek is much more pleasant than near Deer Creek. We have no explanation for the host of small flies that tried to get into our ears and bothered us around the eyes and nostrils. More serious than these tickling gnats were the chigger bites we found we had when we left the next morning.

On the way out, we tried a variation that didn't really pay off except in experience. We went up a talus that covers the Coconino about a quarter of a mile northwest of Monument Point. We had thought we would follow a deer trail into the bay between the promontory and the main rim that leads directly to Little Saddle where the trail comes over the rim. We felt rather sure that we could get up on the rim at this angle and then follow it to the trailhead and the car. After we had gotten above the Coconino and Toroweap formations and had found the deer trail we wanted, the clearest deer trail led up to the rim at the notch not far west of Monument Point. We went up here contrary to the original plan and when we came to wide stretches of scrub oak at the bay we had intended to skirt from below, we wished we had kept to the lower route. We wound up getting into a draw that led down to the Indian Hallow Road, 1.3 miles from the end. We knew which way to turn to reach the parked car.

After walking about 15 minutes, we reached the Jeep belonging to Norvel's father. The starter turned the motor in fine style, but nothing happened. When Norvel looked under the hood, he found a bird's nest on top of the motor block and woven into the nest was an essential wire leading from the generator to the distributor. A nine inch piece had been cut off by the bird. We would like to know what sort of bird can bite through the insulation and about as much wire as is in half an ordinary extension cord. To get wire for a splice, Norvel took a piece to the horn and with adhesive tape and about 45 minutes work with his knife and a screw driver, we were ready to travel. We assume the bird thought that under the hood of a car would be a fine dry place for her nest, but when the sun came out on the metal, she thought that there would be better places for a brood. We wonder whether birds have ever cut wires before.

North of Saddle Mountain (Saddle Canyon)
[June 8, 1965]

We noticed that the distance from Indian Hallow Campground to Jacob's Lake is surprisingly short, only about 36 miles by the back road from Ryan up to Jacob's Lake. After a good meal here, proceeded by my first shave for five days, we drove on to investigate the way down the Coconino I had tried before in Saddle Canyon.

On an impulse I called for us to turn off on the East Side Game Road. After three miles of curves and hills, we came to a crossroad. We elected to go down to Houserock Valley, 10 miles. The road got so bad in the dark that we stopped and slept above the last big slope into the valley. We could see the car lights on the highway not so far away. Strangely enough there were mosquitoes up here and I spent about the worst night of the trip.

On Tuesday we left the deer camp and soon went down below the upper ledges of limestone hoping to find an Indian ruin. No luck, but we found ourselves on a deer trail that I had used on my trip two summers ago. I found the same small fireplace where I had boiled soup under an overhang, and a little farther I came to the level spot under another overhang where I had slept through a very wet night. We located the unique descent into the lower valley from our (north) side and followed a deer trail over to where I had attempted going down. This time I had a rope along which was supposed to make all the difference. However, when I got close to the edge, the bottom seemed so far down that I didn't even uncoil the rope. I guess I need a more optimistic type of person along who wants to hang out over the edge to see exactly what is below. Norvel and I meekly climbed to the south rim of Saddle Canyon to go east along the rim to see if we could locate what had looked like a natural bridge from below. Norvel was quite sure that what he thought to be a hole was only a white rock, but since there was quite a tributary canyon to circumvent, we settled by going back to the deer camp mostly along the south side of Saddle Canyon.

By this time, I was developing a cold sore on my lip and I also felt the need of some good sleep and food at home. After an early dinner at Cliff Dweller's, we went on home to Flagstaff.

North Canyon, Mile 19 Break, and Jacob's Pools
[June 11 and 13, 1965]

After digesting my experiences of the previous eight day trip, I decided that I would like to go back and have a crack at reaching Cave Springs Rapid by land, namely along the Hermit Shale slope. I should have driven up the night before and been ready for an early start. When I left the car it was about noon, and I felt rather sure I couldn't expect to get very close to the goal. I carried six quarts of water with the expectation that I might not be able to find more for 24 hours. I started towards the break in the rim at Mile 19, but soon got the impulse to investigate North Canyon. I had parked the car six miles from the Kram Ranch on the road that keeps north of North Canyon. If one would stop about four and a half miles past the ranch, he would be closer to the descent into North Canyon. I had to walk the rim for about an hour to find a way down, about the middle of block (township) 13 on the Emmett Wash Quad. There was no real barrier in the bed of the canyon until you reach the Supai. After bypassing a couple of ledges, you soon reach the narrow slot. A good climber can get down into this narrow part, but you would soon come to an absolute impossibility where the stream drops through a narrow polished slot into a dome shaped chamber below. Coming up from the river, one could as easily climb the walls of Music Temple as pass this place. The rest of the bottom seems to be much more easily walked than the corresponding part of Rider Canyon. The difference is that Rider has feasible climbs past its obstructions. The Escape Routes Pamphlet should list Rider (Houserock) Canyon as a sure way out and scratch North Canyon.

It was about 3:30 p.m. when I reached the Supai in the bed, and I proceeded along the bottom of the broad slope for the next hour. What with taking a few pictures and having to go up and down as well as exercising vigilance for loose footing, I only reached Mile 21.3 where there is a steep and bare slope of shale. By climbing, I could have found a way across, but since it was obvious that I wouldn't be able to even approach Cave Springs, I turned back to find a good place to spend the night ( We crossed the bare slope of shale with care later.)

One of the surprising things about this region is the lack of any deer signs. The only tracks I found in the sand of North Canyon were Coyote. Deer trails and droppings are more abundant at Saddle Canyon then about anywhere else, but in North Canyon and along the shale slope above the river, I saw no sign of deer or bighorn sheep either.

The only firewood I could find on the bedrock where I stopped were pieces of driftwood that had come down from a distance. After my soup, raisin bread, and sardines; the sky began to rumble with thunder and lightning. There had already been light showers about 5:00 p.m., but now it really poured down for a few minutes. I got down on my bed with a plastic sheet over me. Furthermore, the overhang protected me when the wind wasn't blowing. It soon cleared and there were no mosquitoes or bugs.

Saturday morning I followed the shale slope to the north and came up at the Mile 19 break. I located the peculiar fossil footprint and photographed it again. My impression that the Coconino here is only 30 feet thick was erroneous. A slide covers the lower part, but the formation is more like 80 or 100 feet thick.

On leaving this area, I drove two miles up to the ranch near Jacob's Pools. There are three separate patches of greenery hidden behind the Bentonite Hills. I was intrigued by the rock walls that were old corrals and I believe I recognized some terracing. Only one seems to have much water at present and a pipe conduits a good flow to the pond near the ranch below and on clear across the highway.

Donald Davis climbed to the top of the plateau behind the spring. I suppose the break was the one to the southeast. He found names scratched in the rock: G. M. Wright, Armon Davis, Maddox 41, and also some cattle brands.

Redwall ascent at Sumner Saddle
[June 20, 1965]

Ever since reading about the successful ascent of Zoroaster Temple, I had looked from a distance at the ravine up the Redwall where the promontory to Sumner Point meets the main mountain whose superb summits are Zoroaster, Brahma, and Deva. I assumed that this ravine would have some for me impossible features, but still I wanted a closer look. Whenever I was going to Clear Creek, I was always in too big a hurry for this detour, but when I was waiting for the Belknap Marston boat party, I thought I might as well take a look.

To get up to the Clear Creek Trail, I scrambled up the schist of the main ravine west of the bridge. There were no more than the expected difficulties and I needed about a half hour to reach the trail a few yards to the east of the first point on the trail where you can look down on the Colorado River. One observation I made after all these trips up and down the Clear Creek Trail was that there are three ways to get through the Tapeats Cliff on the west side of Bright Angel Canyon, the route we use to go from Bright Angel Campground to Phantom Canyon and two more further north.

When I was approaching the Redwall ravine from the south, it looked easier as I got closer. At first I had thought that I would just go up the talus as far as it reached, take a picture, and come away. However, I found that the limestone was thoroughly fractured and that there are many hand and toe holds. In fact as I reached the end of the scree, I found deer hoofprints. I bypassed the lowest fall in the middle by going up the broken slope to the east and then with care got back into the main ravine. Very soon there is a narrow slot stopped by a chockstone. You can bypass this by climbing a few yards to the west. There were no other obstructions. I needed 30 minutes to go from the talus at the base to the top of the Redwall and 25 for the descent. As one learned all the holds, this time could be cut. I wouldn't mind carrying a pack up here with no help from another person, and I regard this as easier and safer than the climb up the Redwall at the west end of Phantom Canyon.

From above, the climb down the Redwall on the other side of this neck seems even simpler, although I couldn't see the very bottom (impossible below). There is a narrow cave near the top of the south ravine on the east side, and at the very top there is an interesting little window about three feet wide by two feet high. This ravine intrigues me and I wouldn't mind trying a hike along the Redwall rim clear over to the break I found below Deva. It would probably be possible to go from Bright Angel Creek up here and along the Redwall rim and down below Deva in one long day.

Impressions from the air
[July 8, 1965]

Bill Martin flew me up around Apollo Temple and I saw for myself the cave with the hole through above the Redwall on the north side of Apollo. He flew me over the pass between Apollo and Venus twice for two photos and then he made one or two more passes from the east so that he could take his own pictures. I was a bit surprised at the small size of the orifice on top. The lower entrance appears to be possibly 40 feet in diameter but the hole on top is not more than 20 feet across. I would estimate the height of the tunnel as being about 100 feet.

What interested me as much as the tunnel was to see that there are about three sure ways up the Redwall to the top of Apollo, one on the east side, one from the east up the ridge between Apollo and Venus, and one up the west side (I doubt this) of the same ridge. As well as I could see it, one could come up from the bed of Unkar Creek, climb this ridge and ascend both Apollo and Venus. I also saw a striking basalt pinnacle in the west arm of Basalt Creek. There was a lot more greenery in the east arm of Basalt than I had remembered.

We then skirted the west side of Gunther Castle but we crossed on the south side so that I could inspect the route I had picked to climb the Redwall. It looks absolutely easy. To get to the very top, one should go around to the northwest side of the summit pinnacle. (We went up the southwest side.)

Then we cruised by Chuar Butte to give me another look at the place I thought it might be climbed at the northeast corner. It looks difficult but it may also be possible. It seems that I should be able to collect four more fine summits.

The Colorado River was a lot lower than it had been only a few weeks ago, and it also seemed to be clearing up. These aerial views made me all the more eager to get in there on foot again.

Venus and Apollo Temples
[July 16, 1965 to July 18, 1965]

After Bill Martin had shown me from the air that one could get up the Redwall saddle between Venus and Apollo, I was eager to try the hike. I left the head of the Tanner Trail about 4:00 p.m. and reached the Colorado River in less than three hours.

For the second time I used the cutoff near the bottom of the Redwall where I had found that I could climb up a steep ramp in the Bright Angel Shale. This meets the present trail about 100 yards south of the saddle where it leaves the bare green shale and heads north down to the Tapeats exposure. It took me so long to pick my way safely down these crumbly ledges that I decided that it is no real saving. Actually the trace of the old trail that leaves the present trail about three fourths of the way down the Redwall and heads north with a couple of switchbacks doesn't reach the shale rim at the place where I can climb down. It deteriorates just above this place and continues as a deer trail north around the angle to the west. A picture on page 118 of the August, 1914 National Geographic, taken by the Kolbs, shows a man and a mule on the shale cliff rim right at the corner north of where I found a place to descend. I had followed this deer trail around the corner before, but I hadn't gone far enough to discover any way down. On the return two days later, I decided to investigate this possibility a bit further. Only about 100 yards west of the corner, I found a good break in the shale cliff where a talus came up from below. With only a little work, a horse trail could be constructed here. I should discuss this route with Emery Kolb or Melvin McCormick.

At the bottom of the Tanner Trail, I cut to the west of the last shale hill and went across the low water boulder field to cross the river above Basalt Creek Rapid. I landed on the island and had to use the air mattress again to reach the mainland of the delta. Where I climbed up on the sandy flat, I found a concentration of pot sherds, the most I have seen at Basalt Creek. The night was warm and overcast and I was bugged by a few night crawlers including a couple of ticks. A light rain woke me early but I was able to eat without interference from the weather and by 5:30 a.m. I was on my way up Basalt Creek with a full gallon of water and food for a long day. Right away the streambed impressed me as being unusual for the Grand Canyon, a smooth surface of sun cracked mud. The west fork, on the other hand was a more normal surface, sand and pebbles. I think I soon found the explanation. For the next quarter of a mile up the east fork, there is a small stream running with water that seems twice as mineralized as the Blue Spring water of the Little Colorado River Gorge. In fact, I didn't care to swallow more than a thimble full. The minerals must act as a sort of cement to keep the mud from washing away during storms. I recall that during the heat of August six years ago, this little stream was dry except for one tiny pool.

I have often noticed that burros seem to avoid Tanner Canyon and the park generally east of Red Canyon. There is even a scarcity of deer sign, but in the wet part of the east arm of Basalt, a number of fresh deer tracks were seen. These showed the way past a couple of low falls, and in a few places cane patches and mesquite make for bad traveling along the narrow bed. As soon as the ravine began to widen, I started up the rock strewn slope to the west. Not far below the basalt cliff there is a cairn as large as my Kelty pack. I was able to continue up to the top of the basalt promontory that dominates the junction of the two arms. I got a fairly good view of the black pinnacle that comes up two hundred feet or so from the bed of the narrow gorge to the west. I then was able to get up the escarpment to the north and reach the west arm of the creek above the basalt canyon. On the return I went down into the east arm of the creek a half mile farther north of where I had come up. In so doing, I encountered a jungle of cane and large cottonwood trees. From a distance, I felt sure that there would be springs here, but when I forced my way through the tangle, I didn't even find any mud.

The way to the top of the Tapeats at the upper end of Basalt Creek was sure since I had gone over to the Chuar drainage here six years ago. From a distance I saw some indications that I might be able to get up the Tapeats in the arm that comes down from Jupiter Temple. If I couldn't get through, it would make the trip at least an hour longer but if I succeeded, it would probably shorten my project by a couple of hours. I decided to take the gamble, and it worked out fine. The route was just intricate enough to be interesting and I was soon above the Tapeats heading for the valley between Apollo and Venus. The cave on the north wall of Apollo was even bigger looking than when we were bussing by in a plane. I estimated the mouth to be 60 or 70 feet in diameter. I went up directly below it, but I still saw no light through the hole above. When I got to the brink of this hole above the Redwall, I tossed a stone into it. For a long time I heard nothing and then I heard the impact on the lower lip of the big cave and finally the rock falling down the whole Redwall cliff.

Going up to the top of the saddle between Apollo and Venus was simple. I was startled to find a cairn right at the pass leading down to the west. From the plane it appeared that one could go down here a third of the way and then proceed to the north until you could get the rest of the way down the Redwall. I considered doing this with the object of getting into Unkar and returning down that drainage, but I was afraid of the Tapeats below. Perhaps I'll come up this branch of Unkar sometime and study the possibility. I had no real trouble climbing Venus Temple although the false summit fooled me. From this first summit, the real Summit looked nasty with overhangs on both sides. When I reached it, however, it was simple to walk up the side right in front. No cairn was there before mine.

Apollo needed a little study but there were breaks in the three Supai cliffs where needed. The summit is a platform of some size and is a jumble of peculiar erosional effects. I don't know of another place quite like it. While I was assembling some rocks for a cairn on the highest point, I happened to look south. Rather near the rim was a fine large cairn built of bigger pieces than I have ever bothered to leave around. I could very well have logged two or three more breeches in the Redwall on the different sides of Apollo or Venus, but I thought I would rather spend the extra time going up the west arm of Basalt Creek from the junction with the east arm to see the pinnacle from below.

I got back to this junction fairly early, about three, and went up the west arm. At one place I had to detour around a dry fall. Soon I came to a higher one, but this time I had no real difficulty going right up the middle on the small steps. About the time I had a good view of the pinnacle, it began to rain and I was worried about the smooth lava in the bed of the fall if it should become thoroughly wet. Actually, the rain never did wet the warm rocks. Hiking under the thunderclouds was fine, but I kept a weather eye for escapes up the banks in case of a real downpour and a possible flood.

It was still quite early when I reached the river and I was able to cross below the swift water and make a calculated landing right where I had planned. I had plenty of time for a leisurely supper at the mouth of Tanner Wash and I lay on my bed and read Time until I got sleepy even before dark. Again, the next morning I was on my way by 5:30 a.m. and I made my third fastest ascent of the Tanner Trail including an unhurried lunch break.

Into Hance Canyon southwest of Coronado Butte and the burro trail out of lower Hance
[July 24, 1965 to July 25, 1965]

Barton French and Norvel Johnson left with me just after 1:00 p.m. After seeing about the permit to hike and parking at the picnic area nearest the Sinking Ship, we started to walk to the head of the Hance Trail. I found that I was still confused about the location of the head of the Old Hance Trail since they rerouted the highway. I finally recognized it farther east than I thought it would be. There is a small parking lot that is just a slight widening of the highway and only a few yards to the west you find the outlines of two torn down or burnt down buildings. The trail head is very near these.

More embarrassing than this fumble was my inability to walk right to the head of the New Hance Trail. I found a road through the woods where I thought it should be, but the road seemed to be taking us too far east, and I led the others away at right angles. Very soon I saw that we were paralleling the highway and were going back where we had come from. To avoid further mixups, we went over to the rim and walked until we came to the draw at the head of the trail. The trail itself is about the same as ever, nothing to brag about.

I had Don Davis' report of their trip down from the Coronado Saddle to the rim of the Redwall in Hance, so I was expecting a little trouble in route finding. Our system was to follow the main ravine that is a bit to the south of the saddle until it meets a small cliff. Then we shifted to a ravine over one ridge farther south. This brought us to a lower cliff. We got by this over to the south, but not in a ravine. The 12 or 15 most difficult feet made us face in and look for handholds. Below this we turned still farther south after another slight difficulty that we bypassed by going a little to the north. It took us an hour and a half to go from the rim to the place in the Redwall where I had been before on the Old Trail. French slowed us down a bit since he was carrying a much heavier pack than I would have thought necessary. He also stabbed himself on a century plant and got against some cactus.

At one place I thought I saw a cave up to the east. While Norvel and Barton walked on, I climbed up to see what it was. It was only a slight overhang that had formed a shelter for rats. I caught up with the others before we reached the point directly below Bida Cave. I hadn't remembered how high up the Redwall it is. I would think that the tube from it to the rim above would have to be only about 130 feet long. I also noticed that it is considerably south of the seep spring where Hance had his rock cabin. We camped here and filled our canteens at the splashy little fall. There were a very few burro tracks around so that we think the extermination campaign hasn't been 100% successful. However, we heard no braying during this trip, but we did hear coyotes far away in the darkness.

The rock walls of the corrals were just as I had remembered them. When we went on at the fairly early hour of 6:30 Sunday morning, I was looking for the inscription wall, supposedly on the east side under an overhang just below where the Tonto Trail crossed the bed of Hance Canyon. (Really on the west side at the southern most Tapeats.) I missed seeing it both on the way downstream and also when I came back to look again.

The little stream in Hance in the Tapeats gorge seemed to be running less water than I had seen before, and I also thought there were more willows growing than before. Perhaps the willows are using the water. We had no trouble finding the place to go up out of Hance to the west although I had never used this short cut recommended by Dan Davis before. It is directly opposite the place where you can come into Hance from the east. French was having a tough time with his heavy load as we were coming up to the Tonto, so I relieved him of most of his weight and more than doubled my burden for the rest of the way out. We also switched from going out towards the river to go up the trail on the west prong of the Horseshoe and went up past the spring east of the neck. Even while carrying nearly all of French's weight, I could still walk away from him. I went after the car while he and Norvel walked out together.

South Kaibab Trail to Lyell Butte
[July 31, 1965]

From Grandview Point it had seemed that there might be breaks in the cliffs around Lyell Butte. I figured that this should be a one day round trip from the South Kaibab Trail. On rereading my log from the trip in May, I see that at that time I considered this a two day trip for which one would have to carry all one's water. My experience this time shows that I had been wrong on both counts. It took me 40 minutes to get down the South Kaibab Trail to the place at the bottom of the main cliff in the Supai east of O'Neil Butte where I can start down to the Redwall. From there I needed one hour and 45 minutes to get to the head of the east arm of Cremation Canyon, one half hour less time than we needed in May. (My system in leaving the trail is go down to the south to a creek in the small cliff then north to the slide area.)

To vary my trip to the Newton Butte Saddle, I started up from the Redwall rim at the southernmost rim of Cremation instead of going to the place directly below the saddle. Hands were needed to get up one ledge, and the walking was a little slower at this level than it had been along the rim of the Redwall. However, it just now occurs to me that one could leave the South Kaibab Trail at the right level in the Supai and come over to this saddle. One can get through the entire Supai southwest of the saddle where there has been a lot of tilting and faulting.

Going from the saddle over to Lyell presented more of a problem than I had thought it would. The Supai drops off in a continuous cliff north of here and I was afraid to go to the south also. I didn't study it well enough and decided to go over the higher saddle northeast of Shoshone Point into the Grapevine Canyon drainage. Here the rocks are all smashed by the syncline and it was just a long walk down to the Redwall in the valley. By now it was noon and I ate lunch in the shade of a large rock.

The day didn't seem excessively hot, but I realized that I was perspiring profusely. I had brought a gallon of water with me and I'd drank all I care to. Apparently this was not sufficient, or I was not making up for the salt loss. My appetite was poor. A few minutes after I started on, I found two rain pools at the top of the Redwall that were deep enough to fill the two quart canteen by submersion. I had no fears of water shortage since I still had two quarts in the pack. As I reached the south side of Lyell Butte just after 1:00 p.m., I began to feel unusually weak. It was now clear that I couldn't climb the butte, but in spite of my weak feeling, I continued to the point of the promontory that goes farthest east from Lyell. It was interesting to get a bird's eye view of the Tonto Trail heading the Tapeats gorge of Grapevine Canyon. I could see exactly where Allyn and I had left the Tonto Trail and had gone down to the bed of Grapevine.

I returned to where I had left my pack around the other side (north) of Lyell. By now all movement was an effort and I decided that I would rather go clear around the north side of Newton Butte rather than climb the slope I had come down just before lunch. As I reached the angle between the ridges that extend towards Newton and Lyell, I thought from the view below that I could go up here. I couldn't see all the details, but the probabilities were so good that I decided to try it. Again, at one place I had to use my hands, but the gamble paid off. It was easy to reach the Newton Saddle and I climbed down to the Redwall rim at a third place, directly in line with Cremation Fault.

By now I was swallowing extra salt every time I took a drink, but my leg muscles were cramping worse than they ever had. I had experienced cramps on the inside just above the knee, but now I was getting fleeting cramps in the calves and even in the feet and hips. I filled my canteen again at a rain pool and arrived on the South Kaibab Trail as it was getting dark about 8:15 p.m., very glad to be past the bad walking. It had taken three hours in the evening to cover the same ground I had done in one hour and 45 minutes in the morning. It was a good thing that I had about two quarts of extra water, because on the trail I met a young fellow who had been without water for four hours.

Hermit Trail
[August 14, 1965 to August 15, 1965]

Barton French wanted me to take him for a float on the Colorado River so I suggested going from Hermit to Boucher Rapids and coming back out the next day by the Boucher Trail. Norvel Johnson got feeling bad before we reached Cathedral Stairs so we decided to stay at Hermit Creek near the old camp and just visit the river Saturday afternoon. After lunch and some cooling water in a pool of Hermit Creek, Norvel got over his weakness and we all had a good restful time playing in the quiet water above Hermit Rapids.

It was quite windy for several hours while we were eating supper and getting to bed, but the night was plenty warm for our single blankets. We slept under an overhang along the trail where it is getting down to creek level. A mouse ran over my bare feet while I was lying on top of the blanket. We saw it by daylight in the morning.

There were few new observations. I noticed that one can climb out of the Tapeats Gorge below where the trail meets the creekbed around the bend in the large bay on the west.

I was showing the others fossil footprints in the Coconino and telling them about the existence of more in the Hermit Shale. One of them saw some good ones in a piece of shale which had been put on top of the low wall at the side of the trail where it starts down the first small cliff of Supai. I hope my picture shows it.

We got an early (6:15 a.m.) start back out on Sunday and had shade for quite a bit of the way. About 11:00 a.m. we reached the junction with the Dripping Springs Trail and detoured over there. This took about one and a half hours and we got caught in a mild but chilly rain before we reached the car about 1:40 p.m. Norvel and Barton both showed up fairly well, but I was not extended to keep up with them.

North Rim (Dragon Creek and Hartman's Bridge #1)
[August 21, 1965 to August 25, 1965]

After Norvel Johnson's poor showing the week before, he decided not to come. I got off about nine and ate lunch at Cliff Dweller's. For the first time I was shown the interesting collection of fossil footprints that Haynes collected and mounted on plywood. One series of several prints are what I found at Mile 19, four claw marks showing for each foot.

On arrival at Park Headquarters, I learned that Joe Hall had left only two days before but that Merrel Clubb was around, out to Widforss Point that day. I left a greeting at his car on my way out to Tiyo Point. I learned later that he managed to make an adventure out of this easy hike. He got benighted and couldn't tell his directions by the stars. He finally stopped and set out a cold night thinking that he was in the bed of a ravine. When it got light, he found that he was at the end of the road down the ravine leading to the Transept and that his car was only 200 yards away. Later I learned from him that his cross canyon pilgrimage to see where his son and grandson had died took about a week. For instance, he was exhausted when he reached the engineer's home at the junction of Roaring Springs and Bright Angel Canyons the first night. This was surely when he was in worse condition then he is this year. In his prime he went from Bright Angel Creek up the Kaibab to the rim in two hours and 23 minutes, 15 minutes shorter than my best.

By Saturday evening at five, I was ready to leave the car about a mile north of Tiyo Point. I lined up Buddha to the left of the Colonnade so that I would know which way to go after I reached the road on the return. To make sure I wouldn't be in dire straights if I had to camp without water, I carried one and a half gallons. After crossing the usual number of ravines, I reached the drop off point in 35 minutes which was ten minutes faster than I did this lap on the return when I was tired. It took not quite an hour to reach the rim of the Supai on Shiva Saddle where one can start down into Dragon Creek. I had this place marked wrong on my map. It is right in line with the trend of the creek below, the notch in the rim that reaches farthest east. On the return, I found the water that Kolb had mentioned and that Joe Hall and his brother had located when they went to the top of Shiva. There are a number of big flat rocks in the vicinity of this break and on the top of the largest are several pits up to nine inches deep. Days after a light rain they still had water three inches deep. If I had spotted these rain pools on the way down, I would have stopped for the night and continued in the morning along the Hermit Shale along the north side of Shiva as planned. Instead I went down past the top half of the Redwall to the place where a side ravine comes in over a dry fall. Here, there were a couple of rather copious rain pools and even a nice overhang under the wall with a smooth, level spot for the bed. It was a good site except that I had too warm a bag, my three and a half pound down bag, and there were a few mosquitoes. Even this high, my cotton blanket would have been right. The water was red with suspended clay, and two days later when I was leaving, I noticed thousands of mosquito larvae.

On Sunday morning I left before six taking food for more than one meal and one and a half gallons of water, enough for a long day. First I went back to the top of the Redwall where I had come down and then followed the rim around Shiva to the west. It took 15 minutes to get to the top of the Redwall and one and a quarter hours to go from there to the place where I had come up from the main bed of Dragon Creek last year. The walking was slow along the Redwall rim in this area, and when I had proceeded a little farther, I realized that I probably would not get much past the place Allyn and I had reached last spring. I should have brought my sleeping equipment and taken more than one day for this. Instead of going on all day for the minor pleasure of completing a loop around the base of Shiva, I went back and down the break in the Redwall I had used last year. By 8:35 a.m., I was ready for a day of exploring up the east arm of Dragon. When I came to the fork in Dragon, I had no way of deciding which branch to follow. At the time I thought I would be going out the next day and would explore only one branch. The east seemed longer on the map, so I went up it. The bed was easy to follow with few large rocks and only a few rain pools. I could have dumped almost all my canteen water here.

A little over a mile north of the fork in the bed there is a bay to the east and standing near the base of the Redwall on the west is a fine landmark, a stocky tower that has an almost uniform overhang most of the way around separating the upper part from the lower. I thought of a frontier blockhouse or a medieval fortification. As I was admiring it, I happened to look up to the rim of the Redwall a little to the south and saw a neat though rather small natural bridge. I would estimate its span to be about 55 feet, putting it in the class of the Peterson Bridge above Cheyava or of the Cardenas or Jicarilla bridges. I was reminded of the conversation I had at the south rim headquarters when I was reporting the north arm of Chuar under Point Atoka. Dan Davis told me that Hartman had already reported it from the air, and another man in the office at the time had said that Hartman had also reported another somewhere in the Crystal Dragon region. I didn't get the name of this informant, and later I couldn't even get a ranger to say that he could remember the remark. I had begun to think I had heard wrong. If the one to Chuar (Lava) would be Hartman #2, then this one must be Hartman #1.

Above this landmark, the nature of the vegetation along the bed changes remarkably. Instead of consisting of a few scrub oaks and junipers, it becomes a dense forest of box elders, maples, and very shortly mostly firs. It amazed the naturalist ranger Richardson to hear about this type of forest occurring below the Redwall when for miles up on the rim 2,000 feet higher the forest is ponderosa pine. This shoots down a theory I had held concerning the same type of forest in upper Bright Angel Canyon. I had thought that the coolness which enables the firs to grow thick is caused by the presence of the cold voluminous flow of water below the springs. There is no such flow in upper Dragon Creek, but the forest is just as rich. Three or four types of butterflies were common, birds were thicker than elsewhere in Grand Canyon, and for long stretches I was scolded by the shill whistle of chipmunks. Finally, towards the upper tiers of the Redwall, there were deep springs of fine cold water coming in from the west side of the creek. Once I heard small streams of water falling a few feet on a rock hidden back in the jungle.

There had been no real barriers in the bed besides a couple of easily bypassed chockstones, but I could guess that the very top of the Redwall would still form a 40 foot drop. When I saw a rockslide to the west that led above the Redwall, I took it, but then it was rather a mess to get through the brush and ravines back to the central streambed. After taking a picture of two from a promontory in line with the lower canyon, I got back down by an easier way following a deer trail through the ravine to the west of the main channel. Even though I had given up Osiris, I had scored two routes through the Redwall, one below Shiva Saddle and the other at the end of the east arm of Dragon, and also a natural bridge thus pinpointing Hartman's poorly located find.

When I got up the next morning, I packed everything in the Kelty thinking that I was ready to head back to civilization. Suddenly, I realized that I had food enough for another day and that I might never be this close to the west arm of Dragon again. I left my gear where it had been for two days and headed back down the familiar bed leading to the bottom of Dragon Creek. There is another branch of Dragon coming in from the northeast and almost meeting the branch I had camped in just before they both reach the main bed. On the level ground near this junction, I thought there might be some signs of Indian occupation. On the return the previous day, I had cut across here with my eyes on the ground hoping for sherds. I am not particularly good at finding them, but I was rewarded by spotting a very distinct mescal pit. It is not quite as well formed as the one Allyn and I had found on the Shiva Saddle about 50 yards northeast of the big rock with the rainpool.

I made good progress up the west arm and found the place in the Redwall on the east side about one and a half miles north of the junction where I had suspected that a climb up to the Little Dragon would be possible. The close up view from below still made this seem attractive, but there is a lot of manzanita higher up. Perhaps a deer trail makes this mess penetrable. However, I didn't go up here to test it either on the way north on the return. The appearance of the canyon is about the same as it is on the other side of the Little Dragon. The Redwall seldom makes a smooth wall. There are many high ledges and interesting alcoves and overhangs. I saw two rather inaccessible caves near the top of the formation. At one place I suspected that there is a round hole going through an overhang but I didn't force a passage through the brush to get under it. There were more small rain pools in the bed and finally as I got close to the upper end of the Redwall, I encountered a small, clear stream. It comes down from the higher regions in the main bed and forms a steep travertine chute at the notch in the Redwall rim. It was too steep for climbing, but there was a dry ravine on the east side of a crag that I could climb. Near the top of this brushy ravine, there is a bad place where a chockstone has lodged. I had to remove my canteen to wriggle through the crevice and get on top of the Redwall.

The idea of getting back to the comforts of the campground including a shower and a good meal at the cafeteria appealed more than another Redwall climb, so I bypassed the interesting route to the Little Dragon. After a short rest at my campsite under the overhang, I started for Shiva Saddle at 3:15 p.m. Instead of following the rather overgrown route directly up to the break in the rim, I experimented by keeping to the open rockslides angling a bit to the north. There was one place where I had to do a bit of a scramble to get to a higher ledge to save considerable backtracking to the south as well as down. I didn't have to waste altitude, and I believe I prefer this route to the north and then back to the south higher up near the top cliff of Supai. One factor was disagreeable. I was attacked simultaneously by two wasps. The one that stung the back of my neck bothered me for only 15 minutes, but the sting on the underside of my wrist left a swelling and an itch for several days. After discovering the water holes that Kolb and Hall had found, I ate a snack and reached the car in two more hours. I can follow a deer trail almost all the way up to the rim from the saddle.

It had been a good two and a quarter days with three more Redwall routes proved, a natural bridge located, and a mescal pit to prove that Indians had used the valley. My conclusion about McDonald's route out of Dragon would be that he probably did not use the easy way up to Shiva Saddle and out. If he had to abandon his blanket to get up some ledge, he probably went all the way up one of the arms, probably the east one. Then he could easily have encountered this kind of difficulty in the Supai or Coconino. He may have guessed that the snow would be deep on top and that it would pay him to stay low as long as possible. From the little I have heard about this amphitheater, I may have been the first white man to cover some of this ground.

King Arthur Castle and Guinevere
[August 25, 1965]

I spent Tuesday visiting with Merrel Clubb. He appears to have his problems under control and we had a fine time talking canyon routes. He took me out to the point of the rim above Cheyava Falls which he succeeded in getting named for Francois Matthes. He regards it as one of the very best in the whole park since you see Zoroaster, Brahma, and Deva so well. You can get all of Wotan in one picture, and you get an entirely different impression of Cheyava Falls. The cave mouth shows so well. It is an easy six miles from the paving. Although I don't regard it as in the same class with Cape Royal or Point Imperial, it is going to be a must for guests of mine in the future. He has some fine glasses and he showed me the place where he took his son up the Redwall when they circled Isis. There is a slot in the Redwall on the north side of the point that sticks out toward the east of the base of Isis (Impossible here, promontory farther north). I should have asked him how he suspected this place would be possible. I'll have to take another trip into Phantom Canyon to look at this, but I would guess they did some pretty mean climbing, worse than mine at the end of Phantom Canyon below Shiva Temple. He must like to do things the hard way. I could come down from the Tiyo Point road and reach the Redwall rim around Isis in less than three hours. The prime example of Clubb's mismatching means with ends is when he and his son started from Bright Angel Campground going west to pick up duffel that was left by the parachutists. They got as far as the valley east of Cheops when both father and son gave out. It was a struggle for them even to go back although they had covered less than a twentieth of the project. I asked him why they hadn't tried to recover the Lawes MacRae route. Apparently they hadn't given the idea any consideration (Redwall okay south of Flint Tuna Saddle).

Clubb told me something concerning this route that I hadn't appreciated before. He says that Lawes did the real scouting and that MacRae was just along for the ride. Furthermore, they did not go down from Point Sublime but rather from somewhere near Grama. I am inclined to agree that there is no break in the Redwall between Sublime and Sagittarius Ridge. ( MacRae was the leader.) I could see no sure way up the Redwall from Flint Creek (have been up here in 1967) either, so if I ever want to finish the traverse on the north side of the river, I had better count on keeping just above the inner gorge, except of course from Powell Saddle along the Esplanade to below Big Saddle.

Clubb had made such a big production of climbing King Arthur Castle that I was braced for something rough. He had scouted it by degrees over the years and had taken several multiple day trips just to reach the base. Finally, he climbed it in two days, or I rather think three days, only four years ago. I couldn't believe it would take me so long, especially when I see that the ranger had marked a Jeep road out to Galahad Point. I got started at 6:20 a.m. away from the Point Sublime road just south of Kanabownits Spring. There is a corral just before the road turns steeply up the hill. With the bright red blazes on the trees and the truck tracks for a guide, I had no trouble reaching the angle at the south side of Galahad Point. Clubb had told me about the possibility of getting down at the end of Galahad Point, but from his tone, I thought it would be as far to start down through the Coconino where I first hit the rim. I followed a rockslide until I reached a good deer trail, or rather a deer maintained Indian trail, since Clubb likes to make this distinction. It stays up near the base of the Coconino and takes one past a dripping spring, a good base if one wanted to explore the entire area. Here, there is quite an exposure of shale which I crossed to bypass by dropping down nearly to the rim of the Supai although I later found that a deer trail continues across the top of this slope. Soon the peculiar tower of some Coconino capping the same height of Hermit Shale known as Excalibur was catching my eye. From all angles it seems worth a good many frames of 35 mm film. There are places where one loses the deer trail in brush and many low limbs where deer go under without difficulty, but progress was steady and a good deal easier than I had pictured it from Clubb's and Beatty's experiences. I passed to the south of Guinevere Castle. Clubb had never tried this one, perhaps because it is not at the end of the promontory and the views would not be as striking as they are from the slightly higher Arthur. I continued past a bare ravine in the shale below quite an exposure of the Hermit in a cliff at the bottom of the Coconino. One can go up on either side of this cliff, but I was more sure of the west side. There was no real difficulty in the climb although at one place in the Coconino and again in the Toroweap, I believe I used my hands briefly. The summit has the charm of being quite definite. I would have sworn that when Clubb returned after his success in 1961 that he told me he was surprised to find a cairn already on top and that he had taken it apart without finding any message or can. Still when he placed his own can upside down in the middle of the small cairn, he wrote that to his best knowledge it was a first ascent. I signed my name and recorded the time required to come from the Point Sublime road, four hours and three minutes. I arrived at 10:23 a.m. compared to Clubb's hour, 3:15 p.m. He also recorded that he was somewhat exhausted at the time, whereas I was still feeling fine. He carried his 30 pound pack clear to the top because he has a fear, very well justified, of losing the pack. I left mine with lunch and too much water at the bottom of the final slope.

Clubb is on firm ground in his raptures concerning the view from the top of King Arthur. If they ever develop a thorough trail system in Grand Canyon as they have say at Glacier, I certainly hope that one goes to the top of Arthur. By a good trail, it would be a splendid half day to leave Galahad Point, take in both Arthur and Guinevere, and return to the rim. The abysmal depths in Shinumo Amphitheater are a more impressive network than I know of anywhere else. I don't blame Clubb for losing interest in the rest of the park for several years.

Clubb's reason for bypassing Guinevere is not so good. I suspect that he was so tired when he got through with Arthur that the queen was just too much. After I finished lunch at the base, it was only 12:10 p.m., so I started up. I could see a Coconino ledge that might be beyond me, but I thought it was worth a closer inspection. When I reached the place, I found a convenient walk up in a crack behind a rock. There was no other discouragement except that the very top is formed by overhangs on three sides. I left my pack and canteen in the gate between the main summit and an outlying block 30 feet high to the east. I was prepared to chimney climb some crack in the top, but when I followed the base to the west, I found that the side towards Arthur is a simple walk up. The top is almost flat but slopes slightly up to the east. My cairn, in a clearing among the trees near the east end, was the first.

However, I know I was not the first man on Guinevere since I found a rock shelter under the overhanging south side of the top. About 50 yards west of the shelter is a clearly artificial wall closing up a natural hollow in the limestone for a storage bin. These discoveries made me feel doubly rewarded for the climb. I was a little weary before I got back to the car, but I felt that it had been a most satisfactory day. I used the stiffer but shorter route up to the rim at the end of Galahad Point and got back to the car at the Point Sublime road in just ten hours total time. Arthur and Guinevere made my 34th and 35th summits reached in the park.

Impressions from the air
[September 11, 1965]

Points discussed with Clubb, Reilly, and Marston had made me itchy for the views from the air. The wind was blowing at 20 knots and the sky between Flagstaff and the canyon was studded with clouds, some of which were dropping rain, but I wanted to see the area around Point Sublime before I tackled it on foot on the following weekend. Bill piloted me efficiently where I directed.

Without dropping much below the rim, I got a fairly good look at the tops of Sheba and Solomon Temples. Solomon appears the easier of the two. I would still think that Solomon should be climbed from the east side, but now I believe I would go up Sheba from the west (actually, on the north side Solomon is harder than Sheba) until the top cliff, then to the north ridge which might be followed to the summit.

Vishnu Temple did not seem quite so forbidding this time. My attention was directed mostly to the Coconino. The easiest way seems to be in a groove that slants up to the northeast just inside the northwest shoulder. There wasn't time to study the Supai approach which may be the harder part. I couldn't see the final route, but I could tell that there is little choice. Go up a ravine rising toward the south. I recall that Clubb needed one piton for the summit block (Sears found an easier way around on the north side). (Wotan's north ridge climbed by Packard and Walters.)

I intend studying the north ridge to the top of Wotan where the Wood Party said they climbed Wotan in 1937, but it was on the wrong side of the plane and I got only a little better look than one gets from Cape Royal or Matthes Point. I still think it would require hardware and ropes which the 1937 party did not use.

After a fleeting glimpse of Cheyava, and a brief look at the route through the Coconino Cliff Spring (this before Cheyava), I had Bill fly past Point Ariel. Contrary to what Clubb had said, it seemed to me that the easiest way down is well to the west of the point, in fact, closer to Obi Point (Obi Point no rope). Still I would think that a rope would be needed.

My next objective was the east side of Brahma. I couldn't see any break in the top Supai cliff, but I saw a narrow rockslide through the part lower down. This is north of the middle of the whole butte. There were a couple of possible routes through the lower Coconino, but I would have to try them on foot to make sure. The higher part looks easier. A quick inspection of the west side didn't seem much better. I agree with Clubb that the Supai is more of a problem than the Coconino. Most of the climb would be over when one got to the saddle between Brahma and Zoroaster. The Supai cliff forming Hattan Butte didn't seem to have any breaks. (Davis and Ellis went to the top on the west side.)

We next steered toward Isis to see how Merrel Clubb and Roger had climbed the Redwall. From the air, there doesn't seem to be any ravine where Merrel had indicated through the glasses from Matthes Point. My aerial impression bore out the map, and the best way up (very poor though) in this neighborhood would be to climb the projecting ridge. (Walters and Packard climbed the point toward the east.) (Packard and Walters used a R W route on the projection in the middle of Isis on the east side.) I wouldn't bet much that I could do this.

A reasonable close view of the southwest corner of Shiva reinforced my impression that this offers an easy passage through both Supai and Coconino. It could be used as the uphill route by deer to the top of Shiva. We circled Osiris to the south and looked at the east, south, and west sides. It would not be best to go towards the Towers of Ra and then come toward Osiris across the connecting ridge. Part of this ridge looks narrow on top, but hardly 18 inches as reported by Stanton. One could come up a talus directly on Osiris, then move a little to the north below the top Supai cliff where one might try a steep slight break. I wouldn't bet much on my chances here either. (Davis had to go around the north projection and turn south to get up.)

Next we passed north of Confucius. A fairly good, though distant view of the upper end of Crystal indicated that the Redwall and higher formations would be quite feasible. It would be a long walk from here to the parachutists' camp above the mouth of Tuna, but a few days of energetic reconnaissance should have turned up this route for the evacuation. The next view completely changed my plans for the 18th. There is absolutely no chance to get down the Redwall into Tuna from Grama Point. (There is a fine break on the west side of the east arm of Tuna false.) Clubb must have been reporting MacRae incorrectly. [I retract this now (1969). MacRae and Lawes went off Grama and found the Redwall on the west break side.]

A few minutes later I was seeing something that completely validated the impression I had obtained from Marston and Reilly. One should cross the valley to the west of Point Sublime about 1.2 miles north of the end of the road and follow the south pointing ridge to near its end. Here you can get down the Kaibab and also the Coconino and Supai by going a bit to the north along the Hermit Shale. You can't see the ravine through the Redwall from Point Sublime, but the view from above shows this to be an easy route right down into Tuna. The plane wasn't in the right position to let me see whether one can go down through the Redwall into Flint. The next thing I want to try is this descent into Tuna and a return up Crystal as a fine two day trip. (Descent into Flint one half mile to the west opposite mouth of Gawain.)

We had been warned that we had only three hours of flying time on our 22.5 gallons of gas, so I didn't call for any circling. The principal objective that I overlooked is a detour over the upper end of Shinumo Creek to see where Clubb has climbed the Redwall north of Elaine Castle. We went directly over Powell Saddle and around the north side of Steamboat Mountain. I had a good look at the place above the springs of Stone Creek where Beck considered a possible Redwall ascent. (Nothing doing.)

Then we dropped down for a look at the Redwall in Specter. This was one of the prime objectives so we flew back into the bay. I got a good look at the ravines on the south side, and I am almost positive (?) (we failed when we came up this ravine) it can be followed right to the top of the Redwall. The Supai above looked even worse than it had from above along the rim. The bench above the Redwall can be followed around here from fossil, but it is rather steep all the way and I saw no signs of a trail. This would be the most discouraging part of this idea. The promontory south of the first drainage (?), south of the mouth of Fossil, seemed more promising (Enfilade Point Route). I am rather sure this would go, including the shale slope below the Redwall. Another good two day loop trip would be to come down into Fossil Bay, get to the river the first day by one of three routes and return by the other.

Royal Arch was in shadow and I fumbled and missed a picture as we went by. It impressed both of us as being larger than I had imagined it from the close views. Strangely, I couldn't see the bench mark cairn as we went by.

My last observation had to do with routes off the Tonto to the river. Again, I was slightly confused as we passed the Jewels. The way down west of Copper Canyon was obvious and I could see that it was likely in Serpentine where Colin succeeded. I am quite sure I snapped another place upriver, but the rim just west of Slate is a possibility. I would now go up the bed of Slate and look for a way out on the east side. It appeared probably from a distance (Yes, in two places). In spite of a pill, I still felt a little air sick, but I felt that the trip had given me a lot of leads and was well worth my fourth fifths of the cost.

Pattie Butte
[September 19, 1965]

My proposed trip to the Point Sublime area was stopped cold by a storm that put down more than a fifth of the normal yearly precipitation in 30 hours. There was quite a bit of snow on the peaks and on the Kaibab Plateau. Reider Peterson, Jim David, and I headed for Pattie Butte along the rim of the Redwall east of the South Kaibab Trail, and Nancy Peterson and Lettie David came along and went down the trail as far as the edge of the Redwall.

The day was cool and there was quite a bit of water standing in all the hollows. I led the way and found deer trails about one third of the way. We talked quite a bit and I was a little slower in covering distance than I had been on the hot day last summer. Again we passed the old cairn just before we reached the saddle between Newton and Pattie Buttes. I sat down for an early lunch at the saddle and speculated about our chances to climb Pattie. I knew that Scholing had given this up, and so had I after walking completely around the base, but I had seen something from the plane the week before, a crack about ten inches wide in the most difficult cliff.

The obvious way to start up was at the south end on the west side. When we got within 60 or 70 feet of the top, the difficult part was directly ahead. It was possible to proceed a little higher without real trouble, but I called for a walk around the butte at this height to see whether there was any still better way. We saw a crack around to the northwest, but I preferred going on around once. When we came back to the starting point, we went up to the east side at the south end. Here we found the crack I had seen from the air. It wasn't too good because I could only get my leg into it and I had to search for very poor handholds to keep from falling backwards. There were a few of these, however, and I was able to go up about ten feet and step north to a shelf. The shelf ended in about 30 feet, but there was a notch in the rim which was only about six feet above the shelf. I was able to step up using a crack at knee height and another toehold and slide up on the rim. The lack of a good hold above was a little unnerving, but I could use a bulge in the Supai rock for the right hand and pure friction on flat rock for the left. Jim David followed these maneuvers very easily, but Reider Peterson elected to stay below and watch us.

We had no trouble in walking north along the east side below the summit rock and in ascending to the top at the north end. We built the first cairn on top.

At the higher of the two hard places, I found that when I lowered myself past the two steps and reached down for the shelf, my feet didn't quite touch the deck. I pulled myself up again to think it over and look at the space below. Jim went down, and with his greater height, it was no sweat to reach bottom. He rolled a good sized rock a couple of feet over for me to stand down on. I had no trouble negotiating the crack below. Jim and I agreed that it was just hard enough to be interesting. Reider, who had been up the Grand Teton, assured us that we would find no part of the ascent of the Grand more exacting than what we had just done.

One should be able to leave the South Kaibab Trail beside O'Neil Butte and be to the top of Pattie in less than three hours.

Climbing the Sinking Ship
[September 25, 1965]

After a necessary meeting that let out at 12:10 p.m., I packed up my passengers: Professor von Sivers, Migs Hubbard, and Reider Peterson. To save time we ate our lunch out of sacks in the car and left the picnic area east of the Sinking Ship at 2:30 p.m. You shouldn't head too directly for the rim or you will have to go down and up the deep part of the ravine that drains the valley just west of the paved parking. I couldn't remember details of the best walking from here to the Sinking Ship and I believe I led the party over some brushy deer trails when there was better walking higher on the slope. On the return we kept on what seemed like the old tourist route, that led up directly from the saddle to the rim. Professor von Sivers was exceptionally appreciative of the beauty of the canyon, but he was slower than the rest. He is not only interested in geology but he is also quite a bird watcher and artist. On the drive back to Flagstaff, he sketched the San Francisco Peaks as we drove along.

I was hoping for time to show my guests all the attractions of the Sinking Ship, especially the Indian ruins near the north end of the east side, but we could see that if Reider and I were going to attempt the highest point, we would have to leave Migs and Jens to their own devices. We went to the west of the south tower. Formerly I had tried the ascent unsuccessfully at a broken groove on this cliff. Now we found a place where we could go rather high that is about 20 yards farther south than this ravine. There are plenty of cracks between the rocks which have lots of rough edges. Nothing appears to be loose, which makes this better than the other possibility.

This route had the advantage of uncertainty. I called down to Reider, "we can go quite high, but I believe we'll be stopped." A little later I said, "no I think we can go along a ledge to the left and get into another chimney." This was indeed the case, and only moderately difficult climbing brought us out on top of the high point at the north end of the spine. Donald Davis suggested that the Hance Ranch guest book record of a climb of all three towers of Mount. Ayer really referred to the Sinking Ship instead of Coronado Butte which was known as Mr. Ayer at the time. I was not surprised to find a rock pile holding a stick upright at the top of this spire. Reider and I next went down and along the connecting wall to the real summit north of the first steeple. There was no difficulty until we reached the wall right below the real summit of the Sinking Ship. I found that I could worm my way behind a chockstone, but there was nowhere to go from there. Reider took the lead and went along a shelf to the left. We had both seen this, but we had also seen the awkward corner where a very low ceiling over the ledge slows one's progress. Reider went under here on his back and found the footing just beyond the corner all right. I made it on my stomach but still feet first. We could go to the top by an easy scramble from here. There was a well built old cairn at the highest point.

I had carried a 75 foot rope all the way up here, and now we had a chance to use it as we came down the direct descent in the groove where I had formerly given up the ascent, down to the southwest from the top. There is a juniper growing just where one needs an anchor. The doubled rope didn't reach past all the difficulties. We didn't have to Rappel because there were enough spots for our feet every yard or two. When Reider was down to the rope's end, he was able to flip it loose and pull it after us. By this time I was down the place where I had been stopped before. It required some ingenious use of the elbow in a crack. To save time, I let Reider step on my shoulder and also my knee at this place. It is an interesting climb.

I had already been to the cairn at the top of the middle tower by an easy route. The lowest tower to the north appears hardest of all. (Three cairns without this climbed by Ken Walters.)

Crystal and Tuna Creeks from Point Sublime
[October 2, 1965 to October 3, 1965]

From the air it had looked easy to get down into Crystal right through the Redwall. My idea was to go down at the upper end where both arms of Dragon Creek had been possible, walk down to where I had been before and then go around into Tuna and either visit the site of the parachutists camp or if time was getting short go directly up to the Tuna Flint Saddle and then up to the rim west of Point Sublime.

I knew this would be a long trip so I left Flagstaff Friday afternoon and slept near Kanabownits Spring on the Point Sublime road. It was rather cold with a heavy frost forming on the outside of the sleeping bag. In the morning I drove to the fire road to the basin and left the car. I figured I would walk until I got a nice place in the sun before I ate my breakfast. This was a good enough idea but it did not make my water supply last as well as if I had eaten at the car and then filled the canteen after I had had all the water possible.

After walking along the road going northeast along the rim, I came to a place where I could see the rim from the road. The way down looked favorable so I skidded in the rockslides and broke through the brush to reach the Coconino. Here I had to try a second time before I found a good break. There were also a couple of ledges in the Supai that gave me pause. At one of them I let down my pack and canteen, tied to the end of a pole, and at the other I climbed down a tree that was close to the small cliff. The woods were beautiful and the walking was easy as I approached the edge of the Redwall. I was in the short arm that branches toward the west right near the longest arm as it ends in the Redwall. It is obviously impossible to get down the Redwall in either of these arms. There is a bigger arm also to the west a little to the south of where I first reached the Redwall rim. I should have investigated this before I started north to see what the main arm was like (it goes). Off to the south quite a lot farther there is a place that looks promising. A talus comes nearly to the top of the Redwall, and the top may be split giving access to the talus. I felt that I had taken long enough for this investigation, and if I were going to carry out the trip down to the parachutists camp, I would have to give up the project of getting into Crystal. I went back up the Supai near the end of Crystal in the Redwall and crossed over the top of a shale ridge to get into the drainage where I had come down. I was aided by a deer trail for the last part of this route and this was a real help in getting through the brush. When I got to the car about 12:30 p.m., I was pretty tired.

By 2:00 p.m. I had parked the car where the Point Sublime road is leaving the valley and is ready to start out to the final promontory. It took me about 30 minutes to get to the right place above the good break in the Coconino that Dirk and I had missed by so little. It is right around a point to the south of where we were trying to get down. I really hadn't seen the right place from the air, but it was back in the notch from where I was looking. Getting down the Kaibab at the rim was much harder than getting through the Coconino here. In fact, I found a good deer trail down the unusual open grassy slope that covers the Hermit Shale here. Neither was it hard to get down the Supai, but I had to leave the bed and go to the north for the lower drops. It was easy to get over to the saddle between Tuna and Flint. One branch of the trail seemed to lead from the saddle northwest along the contour. While I was getting ready to take a picture of King Arthur Castle from here, I found a man built cairn. It seems unlikely that Lawes and MacRae would have put this here because it is not on the direct route down into Tuna (they went off Grama). Could W. W. Bass or some other prospector have put this here?

The way is simple down to the Redwall. There had been some brush on the way down to the saddle, but the way from here was much different, practically bare. Even the south facing slopes of Dragon and Crystal had been overgrown with all sorts of brush so that this route is wonderfully easy in contrast. The top 80 or 100 feet of Redwall is a simple walk down. There was first a short pitch that made me face in and use fingers as well as toes. About 170 feet down the Redwall, I came to a place that really had me guessing and studying. The dry fall on the west was impossible and investigation of a fall east of a spur showed that it is no better. However, I found that the spur had a nice crack in it and I could climb down here and get into the main canyon again. While looking for the way off the base of the spur, I found something I had begun to worry about, a pool of rain water. This pothole is over a foot deep and in any but the very driest season ought to be reliable (day in May, 1977). I had an early supper by this water and then walked on until 6:30 p.m. to a place that had some water and also the best smooth sand I had seen. My lightweight down bag supplemented by a blanket toward morning gave me compete comfort.

I ate bread and dates before the stars were out and was ready to move by six Sunday morning. With only my camera, canteen, and some gingersnaps for a snack, I could make good time. About where I had to leave the creekbed or get shut in by the Tapeats cliffs, I came to a small seep There weren't any water loving plants around and I am not sure that it could be trusted long after the last rain (good May and October, 1977). I am pretty sure I saw more water in the bed of Tuna below the Tapeats. Quite a bit of burro signs were visible along the Tonto Plateau and I enjoyed a well established burro trail, so much more easily followed than a deer trail, for quite a bit of the way past the knoll that is just north of the parachutists' camp. An indication that the area of fine burro trails may be past was the desiccated body of a dead burro rather close to the campsite. I am not so sure that the park people are right in thinking that the burros have limited the bighorns. In this area I also saw many bighorn droppings as well as plenty of deer signs. I actually saw two deer at this lower elevation.

The rim above the river was also interesting. I could see the rock splitting the clear current where I had my mishap on the air mattress last year. With the present higher stage, there would be no trouble. The walk up from the river was obvious, a little east of the middle of the narrow plateau between Tuna and the next drainage to the west. In looking at my pictures recently, I found that I had taken a shot of this break from the south side of the river. I also got the best look yet at the breaks in the Tapeats on the south side of the river, and I found that my impression that you can get up out of the inner gorge just to the west of the mouth of Slate was correct. There is also an easier place yet a little farther to the west. Now I would like to check the impression I got from the air that you can get to the bottom of Slate from the east side without going clear around to get down.

Very little was left to mark the old campsite. Perhaps the ranger in the helicopter who shot the burro stopped at camp (Jim Bailey was shooting burros by rifle from the chopper). I strongly suspect that I am the only one who has followed the MacRae Lawes Route (MacRae and Lawes didn't see this) here from the rim since 1944. I don't know how old Lawes was, but MacRae was 42 when he did this scramble. I was feeling my age or perhaps a lack of calories before I got to the car at 4:00 p.m.

Echo Peaks, left bank upstream, Jacob's Pools to the Paria Platform
[November 6, 1965 to November 7, 1965]

Reider Peterson, Norvel Johnson, and I left Flagstaff about 7:15 a.m. and by 9:40 we were parked a mile north of the highway on the old road leading to Lee's Ferry on the east side of the Colorado River. We had no trouble finding the right valley leading to the beginning of the trail up to the south of the Echo Peaks spine. There was an inscription with a 1934 date on a rock shortly before the Jeep road gives way to the regular trail.

After the trail starts going north and up, it splits but higher the branches come together. The higher part, leading over the ridge south of the spine, is particularly wide and well built. When the trail started down to the east, we thought that we should start climbing the spire right near the trail in the belief that it was the south part of Echo Peaks. After some experiments, we gave up the southernmost spire and continued along the base to the west. Finally I thought there was a good chance to go up to a saddle between two spires. It worked quite well and we found that from the saddle we could go to the top of a spire to the south, a few yards to the second highest point along this row of something like thirteen spires. The highest rock was just to the north, but it seemed too tough. We were a lot higher than if we had succeeded where we had first tried going up at the south end. We built the first cairn on this summit. We could see that we were still quite a bit south of the South Echo Peak. I called for a descent to the west. After lunch we continued on down to a ravine that bounds a big sand slide.

Keeping to the large rocks that were exposed in the ravine next to the cliff, we went up several hundred feet until we had passed the slide. From here we worked through the jumble of broken rock to the top of the ridge immediately north of the South Peak. In going south toward the peak, we had to descend a few yards. Two ledge possibilities presented themselves. If we could work our way along precarious ledges south along the east side of the peak, we thought that we would eventually find a feasible route to the top. A narrow fissure pointing right toward us also beckoned. We were unanimous in selecting it. It was a bit steep, but there were no real problems and we had only a short scramble from its upper end to the summit. We built the first cairn, a small one because there were few loose rocks. It is quite a few feet higher than the North Peak. There is probably no good approach by any route other than the one we used. A companion peak just north of where we had arrived on the ridge looks high from the other side of the river on the way to the ferry, but it seems rather unimpressive from either the main South Peak or the North Peak. It may be too steep for our type of climbing, but we didn't give it serious consideration when we were near. My impression was that we could have done it but didn't see the point of it.

We had no real argument about how to proceed. Johnson wanted to go down into the deep notch between the two main peaks and hope for the best on the steep and bare pitches of the North Peak. I remembered our predicament on the similar looking slope of the spire near the Sheep Trail and called for a more laborious approach. We went back down the sandslide to the west and then north at a low level until we were definitely north of the North Peak. Here we could go up to the ridge to look down to the east onto the Colorado River where it runs west for over a mile. A simple walk up this ridge put us right below the last steep monolith of the summit. Now we had the choice of going up another ravine similar to the one we had used for the South Peak or of going down and south along the east side following the top of the sand. The latter looked sure, but it was now getting rather late in the day and we still hoped to follow the left bank of the river into the alcove past Outlaw (?) Cave (Hislop Cave). Again we were unanimous in trying the ravine. It went fine up to a chockstone where I had to try about all the acrobatics I could think of. To make the last foot and a half past the chockstone, I braced my feet against an inward leaning wall and had only my shoulders against the opposite side which sloped more favorably away from the vertical. I have never been so stretched out in a horizontal position for a chimney climb before, but inch by inch I made it up and over the block. Reider saw how I had done it, but this time his leg was bothering him, and Norvel said that he had run out of umph. Neither of them made it over this obstacle I had worried about what the upper end of the crack would lead to, but once above it, the going was simple. Nothing worse than sloping slabs with fair pits and crevices were between me and the summit, quite a few more vertical yards above.

Strangely, there are two summit cairns on the North Peak. The very top one is of generous proportions, three feet in diameter and two feet or so deep. It still supports a stick. In an obvious place I found a glass jar with a neat note saying that it had been climbed that same day in 1957 with one buddy, a dog and Harry Aleson, the day before Harry would be 50. Then followed the names, Dean and Edna Tidball. It didn't seem perfectly clear that they were among this party or who wrote the note, but presumably both of them had come up that day. They added the note that they had stayed on top for over and hour and had started down about 3:30 p.m. I could see that the route from the south part of the sandslide on the east side of the peak would be easy enough for a dog, but we felt rather sure that it had not come up the ravine I used. I was soon down with my companions but I was sorry we had not brought a rope or some way of getting them over the chockstone. (The other cairn contained an old baking powder can with names from 1911.) It was 4:00 p.m. by the time we were down on the ridge above the route to the east side sandslide, and in only 35 more minutes we were down to the trail going up the left bank of the river. Here Reider decided that his leg was going to cause real trouble if he didn't turn back. We agreed that we would all follow the old road above the river and then go from the ferry back to the car along the road that shows on the quad map. It was obvious to Norvel and me that we would be doing a lot of moonlight hiking, but we hurried on to inspect the alcove beyond Hislop Cave.

When we came to the end of the road, we chose the beach and then found that there was no chance of getting through the thickets until we came to the clearing north of the alcove. We had no trouble going into it until near the end. Here the bed steepened and there were huge blocks of sandstone barring progress. I hustled up a talus to the east while Norvel decided to wait for me. Over the spur I went down into the bed again only to find that there was a ten foot dry fall ahead. Again, I went up the slope to the east, but now I couldn't get down into the bed. I was looking at the end only a stone's throw ahead. Now there was no time to go back down to the bed and try harder on the ten foot fall. After setting up my tripod and trying to record on film the overhang ahead at the top of a precariously steep climb, I rejoined Norvel. He had been waiting about 30 minutes for me to carry out this solo maneuver. We just had time to inspect Outlaw Cave and get to the end the old road before darkness closed down. For an hour the moon was behind clouds but our uncertainty about the route was often removed by seeing Reider's footprints. By the last light of day, Reider found traces of the old road leading away form the upper ferry site along the red talus. Norvel and I missed this but we followed the ramp of the bluff sandstone that starts right behind the gauging station tower. We had enough light to avoid the various ravines in the surface of this sloping formation and we finally came to traces of the old road. Near the place where this ramp breaks off, Reider was waiting for us. It was a good thing that we had not found the trail from the gauging station through the shale immediately above the river or we would have missed Reider. United again, we found a rough way down to the place that sloped continuously up to where the car was parked. We were able to see the car by the rather bright moon. I had snacked on extra food that Reider and Norvel had taken along, but now I had a belated meal at 9:30 p.m. and got a good night's sleep in my down bag.

On Sunday we drove around to Lee's Ferry and soon located the sunken steamboat. The boiler showed out of water and we could stand on it and look through the clear water at the old planking of the hull. Only about 30 feet through the willows of the bank there is an outcropping of bedrock and on its vertical face I easily spotted the G. M. Wright inscription. (1892 removed now, 1977.)

After taking the drive along the river south of the Paria mouth to see the lower ferry crossing and the old dugway shelf up the opposite cliff, we headed for Jacob's Pool and the trail that Donald Davis had taken to the top of the Paria Plateau. Seeps were running in several places that were dry when I was there before. Reider had to sit this one out because his leg bothered him after the little walking we had done at Lee's Ferry. When we had gotten over the broken foothills behind the springs, Norvel decided that he didn't feel up to the more than thousand foot climb ahead. When he was almost out of sight on the return trail to the car, I shouted a farewell. Within a minute he changed his mind again and headed back uphill. He overtook me while I was eating lunch at the top of the sandslide area.

Above this, the trail seemed to go too far to the south rather than up towards the ravine we were sure was the right way to reach the plateau . We took off up the broken slope and were probably better off than if we had stayed on the trail. After it swings to the south, it goes up more loose sand and heads back into the ravine higher up. In the ravine near the top, there is a lot of trail construction. On the desert varnished walls beginning about 150 yards from the top are the thickest set of Indian petroglyphs I have ever run into, not counting sites that were well known as tourist attractions. The remarkable thing is the great variety of designs. Some are neat and fresh looking cuts in the dark patina and others are covered over by obscuring patina themselves. There are pictures that I have seen at Supai, Canyon de Chelly, and elsewhere, but there are also some designs that I have only seen in pictures taken by others in Glen Canyon.

The G. M. Wright inscription that Davis had found eluded me until I was about ready to give up the search. While Norvel and I were out on a ledge above the trail to the north, he happened to look down on the south wall. There about 10 feet above the trail was the name we were looking for with the date 1894, two years after the date at Lee's Ferry. He also found Davis' observations of the name Ammon Davis and Spencer and the brand marks. These are on walls on both sides of the trail about 100 yards down from where you leave the plateau. This distance is to be measured along the trail, not a difference in elevation.

We descended keeping to the trail and enjoyed the skidding through the sandy slopes. Norvel's sharp eyes helped again. When we were at the base of the lower sandslide, he found some bits of pottery. We took two hours to go from the car to the top of the plateau including a half hour for lunch. We used 70 minutes for the return.

Upper Havasu Canyon
[November 24, 1965 to November 28, 1965]

Both Allyn Cureton and I were afraid that the primitive road out to the Great Thumb Mesa would be impassible after the record rain. We figured that it would be better to tackle the area south of the Topocoba Trail with the gravel road approach to Hualapai Hilltop. The official prediction was for the clouds to stay through the weekend, and I drove to Williams with the windshield wipers going. However, there was only a little more precipitation and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were clear.

We got started from the car at 11:30 a.m. and reached the creek by 1:20 p.m. with a half hour out for lunch. For once, we saw an Indian working on trail improvement in Hualapai Canyon. It took us one hour and 25 minutes to reach the junction of Havasu and Lee Canyons. We inspected the pictographs and the petroglyphs and very soon found the canyon broadening out to the south. the high vertical walls below this junction soon give way to a wonderland of red rocks in receding terraces. We could identify Mr. Burro and many other landmarks along the rims. It reminded me of views I have seen of the new Canyonlands National Park with the high, gray rim cliffs thrown in for good measure. Arizona Highways might consider the possibility of a fine article on this whole basin. the bottom lands and the gentler slopes of the side canyons support quite a few Supai horses, and the resulting trails are fine for walking. It is easy to keep up a three mile per hour average if speed is a consideration.

Water would be a problem in dry weather, but we could find rainpools in all the small ravines. There were short stretches where it would be difficult to climb out of the way of a flash flood, but most of the time there were remnants of clay terraces above the general level of the bottom. Good overhanging ledges are numerous enough to protect you from rain at night, but finding one near a pool of water was a little harder.

Wednesday night we camped under a rather skimpy overhang a little to the north of the mouth of Driftwood Canyon. Our down bags were more than adequate during this overcast night. We got under way by eight Thursday morning. Almost at once we were fooled into thinking that Driftwood was the main canyon. What we were to learn later is that all of the side canyons seem to carry more water in a storm than the main canyon whose bottom is usually silted in with clay and overgrown with willows. Allyn realized before I did that we were going up a tributary, but we continued to see how it would end. When we were getting near the top of the Supai Formation, we found a fine overhang on the east side above a pool of water and here we left our packs except that we carried both lunches in mine.

There were six or more horses in the upper basin of Driftwood. We passed them and went to the south end where we could see that most of the Coconino was covered by a talus slope. I thought that a trail might lead from the upper end through the rest of the Coconino, but we discovered that this was false. Still, we could scramble up the rest of the Coconino in a gully and walk up a steep clay slope to the base of the top Kaibab Limestone cliff. Up here there was a fine deer trail which we followed to the west. We had no trouble finding a way into the upper ravine and out to the rim only about a mile from the Hilltop road. I would estimate from the map that this is eight or nine miles south of the road end. This would be a fine route to use to get into the south end of the basin instead of going clear down the Hualapai Trail and back south. We had lunch near the top where we found some water in the ravine. It was strange that we found no indication of a clear deer trail out this way. We saw two fine deer during our stay in the area and I thought I saw droppings of bighorn and even some tracks. It is significant that the bighorn do not shun the area that is used by horses.

There was a lot of day left when we reached our packs so we proceeded back to the main canyon and on upstream. At the rather early hour of four, we were caught by a rain shower and found shelter under a large overhang whose only drawback was that the sand below could be swept by a superflood. We could see that it had stayed dry during the recent wet spell, so we figured that there was little danger. This spot is on the right wall of the main canyon a little less than a mile downstream from the mouth of Havatagvich Canyon. There are two side ravines in the angle on the same right bank just upstream from the place, and we were able to fill our canteens from a pool in the nearest. There was plenty of room to spread out under protection from all but the most driving rain. We camped there two nights.

We were away by 7:40 on Friday morning with complete confidence in our ability to keep our location on the map of the Supai Quad. Within a few minutes, where the bed begins an easterly stretch towards Havatagvich, we saw names written on the right wall. Two Wills brothers hailing from Grand Canyon Village had dated their trip in charcoal during May, 1965, and Bennett and Dan Hanna, two Supai men, had signed the register in chalk as of January 1965. I met Bennett Hanna's uncle on Sunday and learned that he works on a ranch southwest of Seligman.

As usual, we noted that Havatagvich Canyon brings in a lot of gravel and cuts a deeper bed than the main canyon. We got out the map to assure ourselves that we were really following the main valley to reach Moqui Trail Canyon, the objective of the trip. There were some big meanders and also some straighter stretches where we could cover the map at a good clip. I noticed a lot of tamarisks along here although there had been none for long reaches lower down. Usually they crowd the willows out up to a certain distance from the Colorado then abruptly stop. It was ten when we turned into Moqui Trail Canyon on a well marked horse trail. Towards the upper Supai, the bed was pitted with rain pockets. Especially along the south rim the Kaibab is broken into towers some of which tilt out at a precarious angle. We couldn't tell from the map where the trail goes out. At first I thought that it must turn out of sight to the south, but there the wall is sheer in the Coconino. There is an awe inspiring defile through the Coconino at the north side of the upper end, and the trail finally headed toward it. A few hundred yards before it starts up the chaos of boulders in this ravine, the trail passes a seep spring. It appears to be permanent since there are plenty of ferns around it. The map showed Bachathaive Spring off to the south below another section of cliff. there are pieces where this trail would be hard for a horse, especially carrying a pack, but above the Coconino the trail shows a lot of good construction and is in fine shape clear to the rim. As shown on the map, it goes across the plateau in the direction of Moqui Tank. I suppose if I had driven out here from the village, I would have tried going down the arm of the upper canyon from Moqui Tank and would have wasted much time in finding the trailhead.

Allyn and I had fine views of various mountains from the top, Trumbull, Rama, the San Francisco Peaks blanketed by new snow. We used two hours in going from the junction of Moqui and the main canyon to the rim. We were back to our campsite by four thirty and relaxed before dinner. From a leisurely start the next morning, we reached the beginning of Havasu Creek about lunch time. We had stopped about 30 minutes walk up canyon to workout climbing the large triangular rock that has fallen into the middle of the wash.

We reached the mouth of Horse Trail Canyon shortly after one and decided after some hesitation on my part to go up and try to locate the route out near Wescogame Point. Earl Paya had told Allyn about it. When we got into the bay north of the point, we could see the talus covering the Coconino on the north side. Although Allyn questioned this route, I wanted to see whether a ledge led off the northeast. We used up the allotted time and learned that there is no access to this talus from above. We could see that there is a much more probable route up a ravine on the south side, and when we were in the village, Earl Paya confirmed our idea that this must be the route.

At the campground we met Jorgen Visbak looking around to see whether I had come in yet, and we had a fine visit with him and John Harrington. They had some young and inexperienced hikers with them from Las Vegas, and although they had spent three days on the project, they had been unable to reach the river.

On this trip, I carried more food than necessary. In fact, I was lugging a third of all the food as I went up the trail to the car on Sunday. It took me just under four hours to go from the campground to the car. It was a good trip and I want to see more of the upper part of Havasu Canyon, especially Havatagvich Canyon where Earl says there is another trail to the rim.

Left bank of the Colorado River above Lee's Ferry
[December 11, 1965]

I was still miffed at my inability in finding names out in the rock that Phil Martin had located after he had heard about them from Pat. Pat had said that the most interesting one was at the end of the short canyon just east of Hislop Cave. After a hairy climb up to the bare wall below an overhang here, I was ready to try something else. I thought that perhaps the right canyon was the one that ends at Glen Azimuth 3187 or possibly the one just east of Echo Peaks. I considered using the recently acquired boat and motor, but since Roma didn't want to come out on the day that was supposed to continue our wet weather, I decided to see how well I could get around by kayak. I would save some time in launching and landing and I figured I would keep warmer while pulling the oars.

The light weight oar powered kayak proved surprisingly effective. By staying near the bank and rowing at a three and a half or four mph clip, I could go upstream quite a bit faster than I could walk the old road along the left bank. In most places the water was crystal clean and I could see the bottom 12 feet or more deep. Sometimes I could see great blocks of sandstone completely submerged which at the low stage of water might be hazardous to a motorboat. Once or twice big fish jumped with a splash that startled me. I saw a couple of 15 inches swimming calmly through the clear water. In a grove of willows, there was a slide down to the beach that made me think of a beaver run. Numerous cut willow saplings on the sand backed up my surmise. The towering cliffs of the right bank and the peaks above the sandslide on the opposite side with the more distant Vermilion Cliffs to the west make this the sort of boating that would be hard to beat. All this wildness and quiet water too! From the middle of the river, I noticed something up on the sandslide that had escaped me before. There is a bare groove or track cut through the vegetation near the north side of the slope. I don't think it is the trail which I thought should switchback up and leave the slope over near the south end. It looked quite fresh and I wondered whether some huge boulder had come down during the recent rain.

Upstream from the mouth of the canyon which is east of Echo Peaks the river is rather shallow and with a stronger current. I got past the mouth with effort but when I was well past Hislop Cave and the short canyon, I decided it would be faster to walk the left bank. There were definite signs of a trail or old road above the water level. Almost all of this was obliterated by the slides of clay and rocks, but in a few places the old retaining wall was still there. I suppose this used to connect with the road that seems to end at the canyon mouth west of Hislop Cave.

There were no names that I could see on the canyon walls. Contrary to what is shown on the Lee's Ferry Quad map, there is no permanent water in this side canyon and there had been plenty of recent rain. Pools were still standing in the hollows of the bedrock. From out on the river, one might think that you wouldn't be able to walk any distance up this slot without coming to some insurmountable cliff. There are many meanders, but the level sand goes a considerable distance in between the sheer cliffs. It is one of the most impressive, not excepting those north of Navaho Mountain. Evidently some of the boaters have other interests besides fishing, because I was following a man's tracks almost all the way to the end. Once I thought there might be a shallow cave 40 feet above the stream level that conceivably could hold an Indian ruin. It was easy to scramble up, but there had never been a structure there. About two thirds of the way to the end, there is a plunge pool. The way I got past was to take a short run and get up a steep pitch on the west. The footprints were missing above this obstruction. At the very end there was a possible route to a ledge below the final wall. I got about halfway up the difficult part and then let discretion rule. It took about 25 minutes to walk back to the river.

On the return I checked the short canyon just east of Hislop Cave for the third inspection. I watched as I passed all bare walls. For the first time I persisted in climbing the bed when I came to the jumble of big rocks near the end. I found that I didn't have to climb the talus to the east, but when I came to the slot in the bedrock, I would have had to climb up to the east and go down the way we had done on the previous trip with the Petersons. This satisfied me that there were no easily reached inscriptions here.

Since I was so near Hislop Cave, I thought I might as well give it another inspection. I don't see why we had been so unobservant before. There were several names on the wall. One was the one Pat had been telling me to notice. Perhaps the most interesting was not dated. It was shallowly carved in cursive writing, and although I didn't take notice on the spot, I believe it read A. Colon. It looked quite old and I even considered whether it might be done by a Spaniard who came through before Anglos were so numerous.

The afternoon was passing, but I figured I could row down the middle of the river in the dark if necessary, so I walked up the longer canyon just west of the cave. Again there were footprints ahead of me, made by two men, I believe. This canyon is not as narrow as the first I had inspected, but it is still impressive. I could find no names on the walls. Again when one is a little more than halfway to the end, there is an obstruction which can be bypassed easily on the east. At the very end, there is the usual ledge in front of the final wall. This time I was able to go up and slap the wall although there was some friction climbing. It took me 45 minutes to get up to the end while I was watching for inscriptions and just over a half hour to get back to the kayak. I had no trouble rowing back to the boat ramp in 35 minutes where I would have taken more than an hour to walk it. It had been a beautiful and satisfying trip.

South fork of Diamond Creek
[December 20, 1965 to December 22, 1965]

Dock Marston had interested me in seeing more of upper Diamond Creek and particularly in getting down from above from the Frazer Wells road. I was foiled in my attempt to go down and meet him while on the Sportyak trip by the breakdown of my Jeep. It was just as well since I never would have reached lower diamond on schedule.

This time the dubious aspect was the weather. We had had a fair amount of snow the preceding week and the long range forecast was for more. When the weatherman changed his tune to references of some cloudiness in the afternoon, I thought I might as well go. I would be careful not to get the car very far from the all weather road. On Monday morning about ten, I parked about nine miles from Highway 66 beside the trash can just south of the dip which is the valley of Robber's Roost Canyon. I went down the nearest draw and in a short time found myself at a cattle tank which is reached by a turnoff from the gravel at the bottom of the valley. A cowpath leads west on one side or the other of the streambed. This is a well forested gorge between hills. In about one and a half miles you come to a broad valley between the hills to the south and the best landmark in the region, a butte that goes up into the Coconino Sandstone. A rockslide of darker fragments high on the middle of the south side is a distinguishing characteristic of this butte. After walking the streambed, I found that a dry weather road has been bladed all the way along here. On the return I found that it is marked, at the main gravel road, Wilder's Spring, Catchment #10. One branch goes north at the east end of the big butte and the continuation turns north at the west end. It is straighter than the streambed and I preferred walking it even though the mud and snow made for poor footing.

When the road veered away, I followed the bed. After a pleasant lunch in the sun, I soon found the Redwall Limestone. The stream cut down into it about 100 feet before it came to the big drop. I backtracked and went along the rim to the north where the snow had melted. The north facing south rim was steep and all white. I soon realized that the Redwall is just about as sheer and continuous here as it is in the park section of the canyon. I went far enough to see, however, that the west wall of the south arm of Robber's Roost Canyon was more broken. I could see both from the only map I have of the area, the Williams 1:250,000 Quad, and by my eye that the walk around would be a long drag. It was now after 2:00 p.m. and I figured I would never get down before dark so I returned to the car keeping high to the north of the streambed back to the dirt road. This time I followed the road clear to the gravel. It avoids the narrows, just west of the cattle tank by going north up a small valley and doubles back to the gravel road. I figure that this was twice as long as going back on the cowpath. I treated myself to a motel room Monday night and returned to the project Tuesday morning.

What I learned on Tuesday after a tedious approach to the descent through the Redwall I had spotted on Monday was that there is a very good route down only a half mile farther than I had gone. I could have gone down in a little over an hour from the point I reached. While I was following the rim north of the Robber's Roost streambed, I saw several caves that would bear investigation. One or two were hard to reach, but at least one could be entered with little risk. They were in the upper part of the Redwall. I was hoping to find a dry place under an overhang since there was plenty of Supai Sandstone around but all I could see was very wet mud. Similarly, when I was down below, I looked for overhangs in the Tapeats Sandstone, but the Tapeats itself was rather obscure. I believe it is not very thick and is mostly covered by talus material.

On Tuesday I drove about six miles away from route 66 and parked about 100 yards up a side road that is marked only by a crude post and no sign. It was on a rise and I knew that more moisture would not make it impassible. Since it wasn't on my map, I could only hope that it would lead to the south fork of Robber's Roost Canyon. Not far to the side of the road, there is an insulated cable that connects small metal boxes mounted on steel fence posts. I assumed that it is part of a field telephone system. After walking for an hour, I came to the road end near a cattle tank, but what is more unusual is a recently constructed leanto with a big tank for bottled gas beside it. The oil on the dirt floor and the copper piping from the tank indicate that at one time there was some sort of power plant under the shed, but I couldn't guess why the stuff was placed here.

This cattle tank is distinctive for the breach in the dam. The dam is over 20 feet high, but the little Dutch boy wasn't there and a flood has cut a V, 15 feet deep. I followed the bed downstream until I came to a resistant stratum of Supai that causes a fall of 25 feet sheer and a further drop of 50 or 60 feet. My route led to the west here so that I would be on the right side for a descent of the Redwall. From the high ground, I finally saw that this was not the south fork of Robber's Roost but only another hanging valley that ends above the Redwall close to the canyon I had been in on Tuesday. Furthermore, the canyon from the breached tank has an imposing tributary which I now had to cross. Further along I found that the hanging valley above the south fork of Robber's Roost, or perhaps we should call it the southwest arm of Diamond Creek, is really double. The east one is not quite as deep and steep as the west, but they go over the Redwall into the big bay at separate points. The only shelter I found on this trip was a shallow cave near the top of the Redwall on the west side of the eastern one of these parallel ravines. The roof is fire blackened and there was a little charcoal on the floor. Needless to say, going down and up these ravines several hundred feet deep became rather tiresome. I resolved to go farther to the south and try to stay on the high ground more on the return. When I finally got around to the west of the main bay, I started up over a high point in the Redwall to a site I had chosen from across the bay. I actually passed a narrow slot and then decided that it would bear investigation. It turned out to have indications of a deer trail and I found that it was distinctly easier than the place I had picked on Monday and also easier than the place that looked good from across the bay at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday. The footing is a bit bad at times on loose material, but the deer go out on the clay slopes when they can. I can't see a horse getting down here. It lines up quite well with the place I mentioned as being where I could have descended on Monday. I believe that place on the north side of the junction of the bed of Robber's Roost with this southwest arm would be easy enough for a horse. As Davis noted, this valley is a favorite with horses. Judging by tracks, deer are also plentiful, and if I am not mistaken, I also saw signs of bighorn.

Fifteen minutes walk from where I reached the streambed, I came to a grove of cottonwoods and other trees. I have seen such groves where there is no water on the surface, but I figured I might as well take a look. It is to the east of the main streambed and is on its own terrace. There was a nice little stream that made a surface stream through the clay. As soon as it reached the sand and gravel of the main streambed, it disappeared. There was one pool deep enough to immerse a canteen. This made my base, a grove with plenty of dead wood, a spring, and shady level ground. The surrounding crags are as imposing as anything in the Grand Canyon, but I found no evidence that it has been used by men. I dropped my pack and gave myself two hours to see as much of the lower bed as possible.

In something like ten minutes, I came to the junction with Robber's Roost Wash. Very close below this is another smaller spot with vegetation indicating a spring. It is on the east side of the main bed and causes a surface flow which is hardly more than a trickle for a hundred yards. About ten minutes farther on, I came to the real spring which is the source of the flow in the south arm of Diamond. It comes out of the Archean as does the trickle above. The spring where I left my pack is in greenish shale. I had to stretch my deadline by five minutes to reach the junction with Diamond. More water was coming down this main bed although the arm looked more constricted. I noted that it took 25 minutes to walk from the junction to the beginning of the water in the south arm. My camp was about 70 minutes of upstream walking from the junction. By noon on Tuesday, the sky had looked threatening, but since I could see more blue near the horizon I thought it would blow over. Soon after I retired, two light showers occurred while I could still see stars in other parts of the sky, but later I woke to a steady rain with no stars anywhere. I pulled the plastic sheet from under my bag and put it over me and the pack, but the sound of the rain so close to my ear stopped most of my sleep for the rest of the night. It stopped before morning and the fragments of fog in front of the cliffs and mostly preventing the view to the tops made an amazing sight. I got started as soon as it was light enough to pack and go, but the fog cut off my view of the slot in the cliff which I had come down. Sixty seconds spent building a cairn the day before would have saved 20 minutes of fumbling for the right route. I went too far and checked two ravines before I found the right place. I was out of the slot on top about 80 minutes after breaking camp. I got down into the first canyon at the same place I had used on Tuesday although it seemed farther. The sky was sending down a slight drizzle that I figured was better than snow. Every time I brushed against a bush, I would get wetter, so when I got on better footing, I carried my plastic sheet around me like a poncho. Unfortunately, I had no compass, but I thought I knew the area well enough to avoid the hardest walking of the previous day. I figured I could ascend south tending ravines and take a turn to the east or left after a suitable time in each. The trouble with this plan was that there were more ravines farther to the south and I missed the count. Formerly the fog had cut off seeing distant landmarks, but now it began snowing and visibility went down again. I must have crossed the draw leading to the breached dam rather close to the road end. Finally I came out on the featureless prairie above the ravines. By this time I was thoroughly confused. I was too wet and cold to really stop and eat a good meal, but I tried some gingrsnaps twice. I followed a higher ridge of sandstone to its end, and then for about five minutes the snow stopped and the fog lifted enough for me to see most of the lower part of the butte north of the broad part of Robber's Roost Valley. Going down to that valley and finding the road I had used on Monday was a sure way to get to the car even though it would be over twice as long. By now I was in no mood to use the easiest or best way back. Walking through five inches of snow on top of soft mud was pretty exhausting and I recall plenty of stories of hunters who had fallen in their tracks. My gloves had been wringing wet for hours and I doubt whether I could have built a fire without a knife to shave off the wet surface wood. I was glad to hit a draw leading down into the valley and find the road. When it left the broad valley, I followed the cowpath to the tank and soon reached the gravel road to Supai. After another hour of easy walking on the road I found the car. I have always been skeptical about providential occurrences, but if anyone asks whether I have had personal experience with them, I might mention the brief view to the landmark when I was in the right place to see it.

Diamond Creek
[January 21, 1966 to January 25, 1966]

Allyn Cureton came with me and we parked on a side road to an unoccupied shack on the hill north of Robber's Roost Valley. At 10:30 a.m. we followed the road past the building and then found a trail down into the bottom land where we hit the cowpath west. I knew this path and the road it leads to through the open valley south of the high butte. I had previously noticed the dark rock slide high on the slope but for the first time I saw that it comes from a volcanic dike still standing at least 30 feet high above the Hermit Shale. The road was clear of snow and mostly frozen so that we walked at a good rate. By 12:30 p.m. we had come to the end of the fork that goes farthest west, and we had lunch in a draw where we got the sun but no wind.

We crossed this big basin south of the main branches of the complicated drainage pattern and got on the high flats a half mile north of the rim of Robber's Roost Canyon and the main arm of Diamond where you would come down into Diamond about a half mile downstream from the side canyon containing the lower of the two main springs. However, we hit the rim at the southeast edge of a large bay east of this pass. Rather than back up and go around to the pass, we started down into an impressively narrow ravine that leads around to the base of the slope up through the Redwall to the pass. There were places where we had to use hand and toe holds, but we made it down. It was a relief when we came to the first horse manure and knew for sure that there were no further difficulties. It took us from 2:00 until 3:30 p.m. to get down to the bed of Robber's Roost Canyon. If we had gone around to the pass, I feel sure that we would have seen our way clear to descend directly into Diamond and we would have had quite a bit more time to see what was new to me. As it was, we proceeded down to the junction of Robber's Roost and the main stream and then walked for 45 minutes down the increasingly impressive Archean gorge. There is quite a variety of rock, mostly very dark, but some is reddish granite. Both down in the Precambrian and up along the rim of Redwall Limestone, there seem to be an unusual number of spires. Just about anywhere you look, you will see balanced rocks precariously perched on their pedestals. We were glad to pick a campsite by 5:15 p.m. and use the ample light to pull together some wood for a campsite.

By 7:45 on Saturday morning, I was starting down the increasingly narrow gorge to visit the junction of Diamond and Peach Springs Wash. The mileage on the map, about two and a half, is deceptive because of the many right angle turns. I kept watching for Donald Davis' Black Aisle. For most of the way, there were still alcoves and sand and willows or catclaw. One could scramble up the rough rock for several yards after a sprint to the likeliest place if he heard the rumble of a flood. As an omen of what could happen in here we noticed a driftwood log spanning a side ravine a good 50 feet above the little stream. About two thirds of the way from the Robber's Roost mouth to Peach Springs Wash, we came to the real Black Aisle. Here for a quarter of a mile, there were few if any ways to get above a flood. We came to the small fall, about eight feet in drop, and saw how it could be bypassed by a man. A boy or girl might need a boost, and it is hard to see how a horse could get up the smooth rock with the inch wide ledges. A burro might do this with a good leap at the bottom. On the way back from Peach Springs Wash I recognized the picture of the pinnacle that was shown in the 1984 National Geographic. It was a short walk upstream from the fall. Allyn looked at the road and in Peach Springs Wash and thought that it was about the way he saw it last fall. A truck would be better than a car for this road.

We got back to the campsite about 11:00 a.m. and after snacking and packing, we moved on. Lunch was eaten before we came to Robber's Roost confluence. About 40 minutes walk up stream, the Tapeats cliff is pronounced on the south but there is no actual narrows such as you find in many side canyons of the National Park. Beyond this point, the valley broadens and instead of walking the streambed, it is better to watch for the horse trails on one side or the other. The first tributary is on the left as you face up (right bank in river terminology) and is dry. Near the Redwall rim on the right wall is a shapely natural bridge where a cave cut through to the surface. This is about halfway from the side canyon just referred to and the next coming in from the opposite side. There is another indentation in the west wall before you come to the side canyon to the south. This one to the south is interesting because it leads to the pass over into Robber's Roost Canyon and I am practically sure that it is the horse route from above into both canyons. You can walk down to this pass from the platform if you keep to the north slope of the promontory separating Robber's Roost Canyon from Diamond and then you can go into either from the pass. We could call this Horse Trail Canyon.

A small spring comes into Diamond just upstream from Horse Trail Canyon but about half the water comes in from the next canyon, also from the left side of Diamond. This is what Davis refers to as the lower spring. We had left our packs at the confluence of Robber's Roost and Diamond and we wanted to reach them well before dark. We kept on then passed another dry canyon coming from the right side of Diamond. It is a long one and might be called the main canyon, but the higher spring comes in from quite a long canyon itself. The forest in the upper spring canyon is particularly fine and there are very few places where thickets or deadfalls block ones progress. Just as we were turning into this canyon, Allyn pointed to some very fresh looking cans, mostly large size cling stone peaches. My conclusion is that some men were using a packhorse to get here and camp because I can't feature a backpacker toting such bothersome weights. A little farther on we came to a skeleton which appeared to be a deer although the identification was not sure since the head was gone. Allyn thought that it was large enough to be a cow.

The springs are about 20 minutes of fast walking up from the mouth of this canyon and come down a steep bank from 50 or 60 feet above the bed. The water comes down by several small falls in the thick bank of maidenhair fern. The actual site of the spring is such a mass of dead and living vegetation that one would have to play Tarzan to get through it. I penetrated the mass slightly but backed down to the bed below while Allyn forced his way to the clear area above and joined me above the springs in the dry bed. Allyn was also the one who saw some more old cans in the main valley below the spring canyon, and he spotted the window on the west wall of the lower spring canyon. It may not be a window through a thin wall as Davis suggested. It just might be a straight cave that penetrates quite a thickness. It was hard to identify trees with the leaves down, but as evidence that Davis was right, near the upper spring, I picked up a half a walnut shell.

We saw no signs of ancient Indian occupation, but we didn't search the flats. There is a cairn built on a projecting rock about 50 feet above the bed of Robber's Roost Canyon a few minutes walk upstream from the spring that makes the permanent flow, or about 30 minutes walk above the confluence of Robbers Roost and Diamond.

We camped at the confluence and went out on Sunday morning by the same route we had come down. When we got out to the plateau, we circled around to the north to get a look into Diamond. We had clear views into the lower spring canyon and could see the easy descent to the pass at the top of Horse Trail Canyon. We found another cairn at the narrow place on the high ground separating the valleys draining into Robber's Roost and Diamond Canyons. We reached the car by 3:30 p.m. to find that some one had taken a jug of water, a steep tape, and a pair of cheap gloves while we were gone. It was nice he hadn't stripped the car.

It is indeed a fascinating region and now I want to go back and enter upper Diamond by the Horse Trail and see all the branches. There may be other ways in, but I rather doubt it.

Salt Trail Canyon and travertine dome
[February 5, 1966]

For several years I had looked at the Kolb's pictures of the Little Colorado cascades which appeared in the National Geographic article and had thought that the bed must have changed considerably since there are now no falls of the size their picture shows. I thought it would be interesting to locate their position from the background and compare the present bed with the bed as they saw it.

After a 15 minute delay to pick up Jay Hunt and then finding that he had made no preparations to go after making me take him along just the day before, Norvel Johnson and I went on, leaving town at 5:30 a.m. I drove the dirt road from Cedar Ridge to the parking above Salt Trail Canyon with only one very minor wrong turn which I immediately corrected by backing 20 feet. We reached the parking in an even three hours after leaving Flagstaff, and this included a gas stop at the Gap. There are now two well built cairns indicating where you should park and also pointing to the trailhead. Since I don't recall having seen them before, I think that Dr. Ricker's Sierra party must have put them up. The small cairns along the trail also seemed more numerous than before. We could still see plenty of hiking boot prints in protected sandy places and even on the sand near the river. Two or three of the party had walked upriver a mile or so to see the Travertine dams.

It was my fourth round trip over the top part of the trail and Norvel's first. He was properly impressed by the entire locale even though the river was a light brown instead of blue. Quite a bit of water is coming past Cameron. There is almost no trail showing except where feet have knocked small rocks aside. I wonder about G. W. James' statement that the Hopi will have to do some trail work or they will no longer be able to get their burros down here. I suspect the only trail construction that was ever done here was scraping a path through the scree slope below the Redwall. There is no vestige of a retaining wall anywhere along it. Although Norvel and I were not feeling up to par after short sleep rations the night before, we went from the car to the river in two hours and 45 minutes.

A tarp from the prospector's camp at the foot of Salt Trail Canyon was all that we saw from the duffel we had found in October, 1964. Of course there were empty cans around, and we saw more of them along the way down. This route to grandeur is becoming better known.

I had brought an air mattress with me so that I could cross the river and look for the Kolb's picture site, but with Norvel along, I walked up the right bank with him. We had the usual trouble getting above the thickets. There is quite a series of springs just before you reach the end of Big Canyon. It is a good thing that one can walk the boulders and sandbars between the thickets and the river. We miscalculated and got into some deep soft mud right at the mouth of Big Canyon. Norvel was right behind me and saw me going in to my shoe tops. We both made some quick leaps for the bank, but he got into mud up to his knees while I headed for a different place and got no mud on my trousers.

We waited until we came to a sunny spot to eat our lunches. The canyon made a slight bend to the east. Soon after we started on we reached the place where you see fantastic designs in the old travertine. Great chunks are left along the banks with one or two pieces in the middle. We were wondering whether we would have time to reach the Kolb's picture when Norvel announced that we might already be there. I soon saw that he was right. I retreated a few yards to get into the sun before undressing and crossing the river on my mattress. It was cold but not unbearable. I climbed the talus until the background matched the old picture perfectly, but the nearby rockslide and the riverbed had changed completely. The Kolbs were still at least five miles below the Springs Trail instead of the one mile they thought at the time. This spot is about three fourths of a mile above the mouth of Big Canyon.

On the return, we had an interesting encounter with cattails that were just ready to scatter their silky seeds. A little of the perfectly packed fluff expands to a lot.

To the Little Colorado rim above Blue Springs
[February 12, 1966]

Ever since I received Donald Davis' letter written November 24, 1965, I had been interested in getting to the site of the mysterious inscriptions on boulders below the south facing Kaibab rim several hundred feet north of the dropoff of the draw at the head of the Blue Springs Bay. It would be a one day project even without driving out on the road past Cedar Mountain. Norvel Johnson came with me while the rest of the hiking club went down the Hermit Trail.

The main reason for this date was that there seemed to be no other counter attractions or obligations, but the conditions for the hike were poor, namely a cold wind at Desert View and about ten inches of heavy but uncrusted snow. On the lower plateau around Cedar Mountain, the snow was about six inches deep and still lower below the next drop the snow was anywhere from zero to four or five inches deep. What helped until we got to the east side of Cedar Mountain was a pair of wide truck tracks. Keeping in the tracks was a little like walking a railroad rail, but it was surely better than going through the unpacked snow. It was cloudy at first and as a storm was predicted, we thought the weather man might be right for once. However, the sun came out strong about 11:30 a.m. and the sky remained clear. We had no real worries about keeping warm until after 5:00 p.m. My shoes were not well chosen for a snow hike and my feet were wet most of the time. I carried dry socks which I changed into when my feet began to get cold. There were no real ill effects. However, we were both quite tired toward the end, and Norvel had to slow down. He seemed more relieved when we reached the car at 7:10 p.m. then he ever has before.

The truck tracks led us around the north side of Cedar Mountain. Soon after they started south on the east side , we left the road where there is a washed out wagon track starting steeply down to the east. The south facing slope was free of snow, so we stayed above the ravine. After turning north a few yards at the rim of the big drop, we found a way to descend where there was little snow. Below the steep drop near the top, Norvel noted an overhang with some very fresh Indian pictures. They were done in very deep red clay on the light Kaibab Limestone. One or two might have been old classic designs of the cliff dwellers, but the rest of the marks seemed to be practice scribblings of a beginner. I suspect that these are doodles of some modern Navaho shepherd.

On the snow covered but relatively flat land below, we saw a Navaho moving a large flock of sheep to the north. One of the four dogs seemed a little too aggressive and came over toward us. I armed myself with a piece of dead sagebrush, and we gave the flock as wide a berth as possible. We were climbing the opposite side of Straight Canyon when the sheep were coming down into it from the south. We repeated this process for two or three more draws that slope down to the east and ate our lunch just before we reached the road that goes along the valley south of Gold Hill. We followed the road until we were near the narrows where it goes through to the flats southeast of Gold Hill. On the slope above the road, we saw a new way to collect water on the reservation. They grade an area about as big as a tennis court and line it with plastic sheeting. Water that runs down to the lower corner of the diamond goes through a pipe to a bowl lined with plastic, and below this is a pipe leading to a sheet metal drinking trough. Another of these catchments has been built on the east side of the valley near the ravine leading to the Blue Springs Bay.

There seems to be an example of stream piracy at this ravine. The valley to the west now drains to the south into a large ravine at a lower elevation. The west end of the Blue Springs ravine slopes to the west now and there is a large earthen dam to collect the water flowing west. However, only a short distance east in the ravine, the water still flows east into the Little Colorado River. A much smaller dam collects this water. The small dam had a pool behind it but the large one did not. There were also several shallow rainpools with ice on them in the bed. I had thought I could remember Davis' instructions about finding the inscriptions. We went to the very end of the streambed and then had to back up a few yards to the north. After passing a rather steep slope with no good rocks for pictures, we got up to a higher level where there is a rather broad bench below the top ledge of limestone. Here are some rather large detached rocks about shoulder high on a man. The surface has a good desert varnish and it seemed as if the inscriptions should be on them if they are anywhere. All that Norvel and I could make out were irregular markings where the surface had chipped off from natural causes. I took a picture to send to Donald, but I wish I had taken one of the entire area. Maybe he saw something we didn't, but we went on to the north until we came to the deep but round bottomed valley that leads up to the natural start of the Blue Springs Trail.

By now it was 2:00 p.m. and we were satisfied that we weren't going to find anything significant. We returned by a route that was slightly different from the approach, mainly in going south in the valley east of Gold Hill instead of crossing the ridge to the road south from the Hill. We noted that we took only four hours and ten minutes of actual walking time from the checking station to the rim above Blue Springs but we needed five hours to get back when we were tired and had to go uphill. ( I found the modern petroglyphs later.)

Clear Creek
[March 4, 1966 to March 6, 1966]

I left town as soon after classes as I could on Friday, but it was 9:00 p.m. by the time I was starting down the South Kaibab Trail. It was hard to hurry over the frozen trail at the top and although the moon was bright, I would have had better going in daylight. The night at the Bright Angel Campground was about as chilly as it had been in Diamond Creek weeks before. We were having a cold wave and at Flagstaff on the morning of the fourth, it was officially 18 degrees. Some campers at the bottom said that they had slept comfortably, so I slept out instead of getting a cabin.

By 6:15 a.m. on Saturday, I was packed up and walking. Breakfast was eaten after I reached sunshine at the rim of the inner gorge. I was feeling some very stiff muscles on my way over to Clear Creek. It took me four hours and 45 minutes of actual walking to go from Bright Angel Campground to the bed of Clear Creek. This was almost a half hour longer than I took last year when I walked down from the south rim and then on over. My nearly 59 years are showing. Clubb had told me that there are some striking narrows in the side canyon leading below Cape Royal. Since I had never been in this major branch, I was eager to see it. He had reported an interesting evidence of Indian occupation also. In the flat next to the main creek just above the mouth of this tributary I came on a deep mescal pit. There is still quite a pile of charcoal covering the bottom.

Not far from the mouth of this tributary you pass the side canyon coming down from between The Howlands Butte and Angel's Gate. A few minutes walk upstream brought me to a small flow of water which increased as I went up. About 20 minutes walk from the mouth, I came to a place where I thought I would have to attempt a rock climb to proceed. Only a few yards from the place I saw that the bed turned a sharp angle and the canyon became impressively narrow. There was no barrier at all clear up to the base of the Redwall, but I found that Clubb had remembered the place perfectly. There seemed to be two distinct formations involved in the two stretches of narrows, perhaps Bass Limestone in the lower part and then, beyond a short open area, the Tapeats. Where the upper narrows opened out was a half acre of march and here is where the spring starts. The tributary from the east side of Angel's Gate just cuts a notch in the high wall and the drainage from the southwest side of Thor's Temple drops down into the main canyon by a steep chute. I believe I could have climbed out here, but there wasn't time. I continued east to the Redwall cliff below Cape Royal.

On the return I went across the steep talus to the arm that heads east of Thor. This cutoff must have taken longer than going down the bed to the junction and up. When I was near enough to get a fairly good look at the Redwall at the head I took a picture and turned back. It was not so obviously impossible as the cliff at the east end of this system and I should have gone on for a closer look but I began to feel a bit weak from lack of food. I ought to carry a snack for such occasions. I think the upper end is formed by an interesting narrow gorge, but that there is no hope of climbing out.

When I reached the supplies beside Clear Creek, I ate supper and then decided that there would be no time on Sunday to do any further exploring if I were to get up to the south rim. The time was past when I could spend four hours in Clear Creek and then start the nine miles to Phantom Ranch and then begin the climb out in late afternoon. After eating I moved my gear up near the trail and went to sleep. About midnight the clouds covered the full moon so ominously that I packed up and walked to the Bright Angel Campground between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. After an hour of sleep and a leisurely breakfast and a visit with the maintenance man, Schmidt, I started out. The upward trip was broken by a lunch stop and a climb up through the window southwest of the trail at the contact between the Bright Angel Shale and the Muav. The top part of this scramble required care, and the window is not as big as I had thought, only about ten feet wide by twelve high.

There was plenty of water in the two water pockets near the trail where it crosses the wash east of Sumner Point.

Impressions from the air
[March 31, 1966]

The Readers Digest conducted tour happened to be over some of the territory that is particularly interesting to me, and the pilot even did a bit of turning and tilting by request. We were rather high when we passed over Osiris, so I didn't learn anything new. I did get a look at the Redwall on the south side of Flint Creek, and I would say that there is a very good chance that one can get down (yes).

They had called the scenic flight a guided tour, but I found myself acting as the guide among our group. We had a good look at the source canyon of Tapeats Creek. I couldn't tell for sure whether there is water coming out of the cave at this time, but I think not. Thunder Spring was putting on a fine show and we all seemed to feel that it is more impressive from the air than the falls at Havasu. I had to ask the pilot to go a bit to the south or we would have missed Deer Creek Falls by passing directly above them. There was quite a streambed and lagoon separating them from the river.

Just before we arrived above Fishtail Canyon, I noted a long talus that covered the Redwall on the north side of the river. One can come down into the shallow valley at the head of the minor, nameless canyon between Deer Creek and Fishtail and turn to the east when it reaches the Redwall. (Almost. We no longer think this is possible without a rope. Possible, the northern route 2 7 71. P. T. Reilly has told me that a young man, Mortensen and one other have used this without a rope.) Just a short distance around the corner there is this talus. It would be easy to get off the rim at Little Saddle on the regular horse trail and get down to the mouth of Kanab Creek. It would be considerably shorter than either the Hack's Canyon or the Deer Creek routes.

Kanab Canyon isn't seen well from the air since the inner gorge is so narrow. Tuckup Canyon looks fine and impressive. I was also most interested in seeing Fern Glen Canyon from the air, and Bill Butcher called my attention to the Alamo Window before we were past. The long canyons on the south side, National and Mohawk, were also fascinating and I hope that someday not too far in the future I'll be going down them too.

False start, Mount Burro and Havatagvich
[April 7, 11, and 12, 1966]

I left Flagstaff on the 7th with plans for a through 6 day coverage of the Osiris area but the heat combined with my 27 pound pack got to me as I was climbing the granite behind the Bright Angel Campground. I wasn't used to feeling so debilitated and my self diagnosis was that I am getting too old for this sort of thing. Furthermore, I was worried about the seep above the Redwall on the south side of Shiva. The last six weeks had furnished no precipitation. Rather than tackle something that might become a disaster, I returned to the Bright Angel Campground. After quite a pause and some conversation with one of Georgie's passengers from Prescott who had hiked up Granite Mountain there with Jay Hunt and me, I started back up the South Kaibab Trail. It became progressively cooler in the late afternoon and I satisfied myself that I can still hike three hours and 45 minutes walking time to the rim. I also sat down to eat for an additional 45 minutes, but the total elapsed time was better than my time in early March on a muddy trail.

The South Kaibab Trail is carrying a lot of traffic this spring with the construction blocking the River Trail and the lower Bright Angel Trail. Some of the hikers seem to have no idea as to how much water they will need on the South Kaibab Trail. I didn't carry a full canteen downhill, but I parted with almost all that I had to help three people who admitted they were already in straits. At the end of the day, only about a half mile from the top, I came on a teenager who was trying to sleep in the dust of the trail. His buddies had gone on to the top, and none of them had taken any food down for the entire day to Phantom Ranch and back. Some of my gingersnaps gave him enough energy to get him out.

After a quiet Friday, we invited Sam and Anne and the two grandchildren over for a trip on Lake Powell on Saturday. We played with the kids while Sam and Anne took our boat to Rainbow Bridge and back in good time.

On Monday, I got off for a two day trip to take care of a couple of minor projects. After leaving my plans at the District Ranger's Office, I started out along the Topocoba Road. The Forest Service has put up some new signs. The road is numbered 328, but it is worse, if possible, than it used to be several years ago. Someone succeeded in driving through leaving ruts eight inches deep. There is no moisture left but one has to dodge the deep ruts as well as natural gullies in the road. I parked about one fourth mile east of where the Jeep road leaves to go up on Great Thumb Mesa.

After an early lunch, I started up the draw to the south at 11:30 a.m. I was far enough to the east so that I missed the canyons that drain to the cliff above Topocoba Spring. The terrain was fairly level, and before I realized it, I was at the head of the drainage that separates Mount Burro and Pot Hole Point. After crossing the first valley, I saw the distinctive isolated wall standing west of Pot Hole Point. I crossed the valley back to the north, but then I felt uncertain about the identification. I began to think that the tower I had seen might be Mount Spoon head, so I crossed the valley again and proceeded west. Finally, I was sure of Pot Hole Point and was able to identify Mount Burro. Crossing again where the ravine was quite deep took time, but I finally got to Mount Burro on the north side of the draw that drains to the north of the saddle. I could see a distinct deer trail going up on top of Mount Burro, and it just took some time to walk over and up. I built a small cairn to mark the spot, and it was a help when I returned. Just above this place on the rim, there is a fissure in the Kaibab Limestone that makes a couple of good overhanging shelters and one fairly long cave. I would have needed a light to explore it completely. I stopped looking it over when I saw that I would have to chimney climb down a crack that was getting to be too dark for comfort.

As I thought, the views from the west rim of Mount Burro were outstanding. I could see a lot of the route used by Allyn and me last Thanksgiving. There was a well built, old cairn at the west rim.

On the way back to the car from Mount Burro, I followed a route that was west of the way I had come. I was about 40 yards from the rim of the draw that drains from between Burro and Spoonhead when I came to a hole that seemed very localized, not connected with a crack. Besides several good overhangs for shelter, an arm led away to the southwest farther than I could follow it without a light. When I tossed a rock ahead, I seemed to have come near the end, about 30 yards in all. It might have been my imagination, but the ceiling near the entrance seemed to be fire blackened.

I turned north too soon on the return and I got into the canyons that drain to the cliff above Topocoba Spring, but still I reached the car in a half hour less than it had taken me to go to the end of Mount Burro. Without the mistakes in route finding, one should be able to go from the car to the end of Mount Burro in less than three hours.

To get a location of the cave, I used my compass to take the angle between the center of the peak beyond Pot Hole Point and the center of Mount Burro. It was 30 degrees. I also noticed that there is a surveyors rod with two crossbars mounted on a post set on a hill across the draw. It was 35 degrees north of the line to Mount Burro.

On Tuesday, I drove the car back to the Pasture Wash crossroads and headed for Moqui Tank. There were a couple of places where this road was more nearly washed out than any other I had driven. If the car should slip down into the gully, it would have been hung up. When I had gone five miles, I came to a road that went north and then turned somewhat to the east. I learned at the end of the day that this road comes back to #328 at the cattle guard in the valley where the ranch is located north of the road. Where this road started east, I parked and proceeded a little north of west. After walking for an hour in the direction of Mount Trumbull, I came to the head of Moqui Trail Canyon. I passed the north arm rather high where it is shallow and walked to the trailhead where Allyn and I had topped out in November. The trail shows so distinctly from above that I decided to look for a similar one in Havatagvich before I should start down.

After consulting the Supai Quad map, I headed for Chikapanagi Tank and on to the rim. I spent a few minutes looking at a fissure cave near the rim, but I could see the end by daylight. I followed the rim to the point north of here and decided that the Coconino is the real barrier. There seemed to be a place where it might be partially covered by a talus below and an erosion slope above quite near where I first looked down. However, there was no trail leading to the place from below or above, so I didn't go down to inspect it. I followed the rim around north and then east for a long distance. There was a place not far east of the place where the stream plunges over the Coconino to cross the canyon, but I figured it would be more effort than walking east to where the canyon is shallower. Here and also in the north arm of Havatagvich, the stream cuts a narrow notch into the top part of the Coconino, but I could be morally sure that there were falls and plunge pools in the notch. The entire drop occurred too abruptly. There were deer trails along the shale above the Toroweap Formation, but they seemed never to lead to any lower.

When I finally crossed, I had to go down between two and three hundred feet. Where I came up on the north side, I found a rough cairn to mark the cross canyon route. After eating here, I headed northwest to strike the rim of the north arm. I saw where this arm collects two branches and then cuts a narrow and steep notch through the Coconino Sandstone. The lower end of the north comes out above an impressive overhang where the Hermit Shale is gone. Horse and deer trails lead up to a spring at the bottom of the Coconino a few hundred yards to the west on the north side of this arm. From here I went west to the point and looked back at the rim I had followed along the south side of the main arm. If there is any place to get through the Coconino in all of Havatagvich, it has to be below where I first looked down, but I don't believe this would be possible either. I think the Indian who told us there is a trail in this canyon was confused in reading our map (no, we got the route later).

I got back to the car in only two hours by paralleling the escarpment that goes east and then south.

South Kaibab to Bright Angel Trail along the Redwall
[April 16, 1966]

A new hiker, Garth Boyd, wanted to go with Reider Peterson and me. He used to be a two miler in school, but I thought it would be smart to check his present condition and also mine, so we went out and climbed Sunset Crater as fast as could. He easily came within the 25 minutes limit that I have been setting for hikers who wish to go to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back the same day. His time was 19 and a half minutes. I was gratified to find that I could still do the climb in 16 and a half minutes thus tying my time of last June.

We started down the South Kaibab Trail a bit before 8:30 a.m. and reached the departure point in 45 minutes. It was south of the last bit of Supai Sandstone forming a knoll just before the trail starts down the Redwall. We were at once impressed with the fact that the footing is considerably worse along here at the Redwall rim than it is on the way to Pattie Butte. I had estimated that it would take us an hour to reach the head of Pipe Canyon, but it was more like 80 minutes. We were impressed by the display of spring flowers pentemons , loco, and white flowered shrub, and redbud trees. There were also quite a few more birds around than one usually sees in the Grand Canyon.

As we were about to pass the head of Pipe Creek, we saw a circle of rocks that had contained a campfire, and several places farther along, we saw footprints, so that we figure Allyn Cureton was not the only one who ever preceded us over this route.

Just east of the bedrock crossing of Pipe Creek, we examined a small cave. The entrance was only big enough to crawl through, and it didn't get much bigger. At the end there was a bend that made striking a match necessary but the whole thing was only about 35 feet long. This cave, although under only a few yards of limestone, has some rudimentary speleothems, just nodules of travertine.

When we passed the first little cape sticking out from the west side of the rim above Pipe Creek, Boyd looked back and saw a cave entrance that was quite accessible. We had to detour back to examine it. We figure it is the one Allyn told me about. The floor is level and dusty, but the mouth is so large in proportion to the depth that the whole interior is well lit by daylight. The cave is about 30 feet deep and 20 feet wide, and the entrance is about 20 feet high.

We were not quite to Yavapai Point when we stopped for an early lunch. It was pleasantly cool in the shade, a perfect day for a hike. If the day had been hotter, I would have really been short of water. My two quart canteen was empty about 20 minutes before we reached the water station on the Bright Angel Trail at the top of the Redwall. The walking was much easier and faster after we rounded the bend and could look down on Indian Gardens. About a third of the way from the point to the Bright Angel Trail, we came on a large and well built cairn. We didn't take it apart to see whether it contained a claim paper. For short distances we had been able to find deer trails, but after we reached the cairn, there was a rather distinct trail that we could follow easily.

I saw a possible route up the Redwall clear across the canyon, in the bay just west of Sturdevant Point. If one wanted to climb out near Widforss Point, this might be the way.

Marble rim from Tiger Wash to Mile 21.7
[April 24, 1966]

Pat had spotted a probable way through to the Hermit Shale and wanted me to check his aerial view from the ground.

As usual, driving the reservation roads was more than half the problem in locating a particular place. I should have remembered more about them since I have been over that territory a year or two ago. I left Highway 89 over a mile north of Curve Wash, a big indentation in the Echo Cliffs. I knew I should turn south something like two miles up from the highway, but I felt unsure of the right place. In my confusion, I ended by following a broad valley that angles southwest and parked about seven miles from the highway. I went 0.9 miles beyond a dry tank where Norvel and I left the car when we hit the rim above Stanton's Marble Pier. The car was parked just east of a draw that cuts the fault valley at right angles and also drains into the bay at Mile 24.6. I followed the high ground west of this ravine and came to the rim on the north side of Tiger Wash. I was thoroughly confused about my location until I recognized the slump block on the north rim of South Canyon. Oh well, I had been intending to visit the rim above Tiger Wash some time. Here and all along the rim to the north the views down on the rapids with the river running clear were outstanding.

On the way northeast, I had very clear views of the opposite canyon wall and I could pick out three places where there is a sure way down through the Supai to the beach. Of course the talus above Cave Spring Rapid was one of them. Another was just upstream from Stanton's Marble Pier, and the third was at Mile 25 or possibly a bit upstream. The latter would connect with North Canyon by way of the Hermit and thus would constitute an escape route from the river. At one or two places along the rim, I noticed deep fissures partly filled with blocks of limestone. In one I tried going down. At a depth of 30 feet under some big blocks I found that the crack, rather too wide for chimney climbing, went on down for 30 or 40 feet.

When I came to the bay at mile 24.7, I detoured along the rim until I was able to cross precisely where Norvel and I had entered this wash. I followed rather close along the rim to the next bay, the one that meets the river at mile 21.7. This is an interesting wash since the slot down to the Coconino is very narrow and steep. The slope from about halfway through the Kaibab down to this dropoff is quite steep and correspondingly short. I went east until I could get down the rim cliffs.

When I first discovered my mistake by coming out at Tiger Wash, I should have returned to the car and driven to a better position for reaching the 21.7 mile wash. I had left the car at 9:30 a.m. and when I reached the rim above the right canyon, it was already 3:15 p.m. I had already taken pictures of this supposed route through the Coconino a little to the south of the dropoff, and I was about ready to figure that this project of going down it would have to wait for another day. The thought that Donald Davis would wind up this attempt at once even if he had to reach the parked car by moonlight spurred me on. Also rainpools for a refill in the canteen would make it much easier to return to the car in comfort. I had taken only two quarts of water along.

Walking down the bed was slowed by the large blocks, but I could see quite a few sheep tracks. There were at least four places where the descent was easier because someone had piled rocks up to form a step. At least one of these piles was in the middle of the bed where successive floods would sweep it away, so I would attribute this trail improvement to modern Navaho. One place in the bed was particularly interesting. By some means, the bed had been removed forming a bowl about 25 feet in diameter while a rim of rock no more than three feet thick formed a dam on the downstream side. Earth had blown into this hollow and weeds had grown thick. The presence of so much soil would indicate that no super floods had come down here in the time it took the earth to blow in and for the weeds to grow. I have seen plenty of small deep plunge pools below fairly high falls, but I don't know of another place where the basin is so broad in relation to the narrowness of the bedrock dam.

Before one comes in sight of the final plunge over the Coconino, he gets to a ten foot fall where he has to go along a ledge to the south. Here he must crawl under a leaning rock which forms a short tunnel and then he can get down the broken slope to the bed below. This is where I was first convinced that someone had built stepping stones to improve the descent. The deepest rainpool was below. I think the Indians bring their sheep down here for a drink. I don't think that the improvements are a sure sign that this is a route down to the river. The biggest plunge pool was below a 20 foot drop in the upper Coconino and was inaccessible.

I seem to be deteriorating as a climber and it took a little nerve for me to follow the meager steps and handholds along the cliff to the south to the place where the Coconino looks quite possible. I had put down my pack about 300 yards up the canyon where I had to begin using my hands. Now I could have used the rope I had carried all day. There are at least three places where a climber like Davis or Cureton could have gone down, but I was unsure that I could return and I reluctantly spent the time going for the rope. Even if one could go down here without a rope, I am not sure where he could get through the Supai to the river. (On a later trip, three of us got through the Coconino by a ropeless route, but neither Chuck Johnson nor I cold get directly to the river. We needed to follow the Hermit Shale south to Mile 24.5. Later, Al Doty showed us a way through the Supai to the river at the point between main 21.7 Mile Wash and the ravine just south of it.

In getting back to the car, I got up on the plateau to the west of the draw and went south or mostly towards Shinumo Altar. I reached the upper end of the fault valley in which the car was parked in about one and a half hours and found that I had to walk southwest down this valley for 35 minutes to reach the car. I was plenty tired, but it was broad daylight, about 6:45 p.m. There were some spring flowers and a few birds. I saw only one Mariposa tulip. The day had been breezy and cool, ideal for a long walk.

Cave and Mile 21.7 Wash
[May 7, 1966]

I parked the car where the road goes south to Pine Reservoir from the main road west about a mile north of Curve Wash. I was three and a half miles west of State Route 89. I was aware of the fact that I would have to walk more than four miles to reach the rim where I wanted to go down, but my plan called for a trip below the rim to the Colorado River at Stanton's Marble Pier and then to Cave Springs and then to Mile 29 Wash where I would come out by the trail. Whatever distance I saved by driving at the beginning would be added to a rim hike of ten miles at the end. The car was on high ground and would be visible for quite a distance from several directions. I took the precaution of carrying a compass and noting that magnetic south was straight toward Shinumo Altar.

At first when I left the car I followed truck tracks in a northwesterly route, but they ended rather soon near a ruined hogan and I headed across country. For some distance I walked along the bed of a shallow valley that I thought would lead to the correct notch in the rim, but when I started going almost due north, I left it for a draw that was farther west. This was a mistake. About one and a half hours from the car, I came to the rim, I was a half mile south of the right canyon. I finished by getting down into Mile 21.7 Wash right where I had two weeks before.

Before going to the bottom, I noticed across the canyon a peculiar fault line. The rock near the canyon rim had arched down sharply in a slippage that paralleled the canyon wall. Then the strata leveled and dropped with a translational movement. At the west end it is easy to climb out of the canyon. I didn't notice any displacement on the south wall, but I could get up or down there too. I thought the situation worthy of a picture, but when I supposedly finished the roll, I discovered that the lever hadn't been turning the film at all. Thus, my last three trips, two to Mile 21.7 Wash and the trip to Oak Canyon on Lake Powell, are photographically unrecorded.

It was now nearly eleven but I thought that I should take the time to see the deep cave somewhere near the rim on the north side of the canyon. When I was almost out on the north, I thought that since I was so close to the fault zone, I would walk over 20 yards and see it. I was happily surprised to see that it was the deep cave. I hadn't realized that the cave is actually below the north rim by a few yards. If one were approaching it from the north, it would be hidden until he started down. It is indeed an impressive hole. I climbed down 70 or 80 feet and thought I took a pictures of the mouth looking out. I also heard an eerie moan and soon saw a couple of large owls. They obligingly posed up near the entrance in good light, but my camera's click wasn't exposing any film.

Another thought about the legend that victims of an attack sought sanctuary in this cave and then escaped down to the river is this. Pursuers may have seen the defeated escaping toward this cave when they were actually getting into the canyon. If the refugees had 15 minutes lead on the pursuers they could run down past the cave into the bed of the canyon. The attackers could spend their time waiting at the cave mouth, but those in flight would proceed to the river and get across.

About the time I was getting back to my pack in the bed of the canyon, the weather began to look bad with wind and lightning. A few rocks fell from the rim and I ate lunch out of the light rain under an overhang. My determination to go down this extremely narrow gorge began to falter. However, after two rests, the shower seemed to be over and I went on down with my whole outfit. This time I noticed something that indicated the use of this as a route for men to descend to the bottom of Marble Canyon. Three of the places where people had placed stepping stones that I had supposed were for sheep to reach the rainpool were above a narrow chute that would stop domestic sheep. One more (the largest) pile of stepping stones was below this chute.

As before, when I came to the view over Marble Canyon I proceeded with caution past the precarious place along the wall to the south and out to the broken slope of Coconino Sandstone. This time I had a rope and I found a good little shrub that would serve as a support just above one of three likeliest routes. Two weeks earlier I had thought it was a bit steep for safe climbing, especially when one is tired. I had no trouble in getting down safely while holding the doubled rope, and I feel rather sure that I could climb up and down here without using the rope. When I got down to the talus below, I tried coming up a sort of chimney to the east a few yards. I could get about halfway up but I reached a place that stopped me, but this was partly because I knew two other routes that are easier, the one I had come down and another a few yards to the west. On the latter, I had no trouble at all in going up. Two weeks previous I had been down to this ledge but hadn't had the gumption to follow it around a corner or I would have gone through the Coconino then. After I had gone back up to where I had left the pack and canteen, I came down once more using the rope and then pulled it down after me. The place I had gone up was easier and safer than where one has to cross the meager ledge from the bed of the wash to get above the break in the Coconino and it is also easier than the chute before you get down to the place where you detour around a fall by going under a big rock and then use the stepping stones. I had to watch my footing but there were no other difficulties in getting down to the Supai rim above the river. Of the two neighboring cuts through the lower cliffs, the one to the south seems to offer the best chance to get down to the water, but from what I could see from above, it might be impossible to get down about 15 feet at one place only (it goes near the point). I had intended to follow the slope above the Supai cliff to the south until I could find a break to the river at Mile 23.3 or thereabouts. While I was trying to make up my mind to continue along this slow and difficult route, the storm clouds got black and I didn't relish the idea of spending a wet night under my plastic sheet wondering whether the reservation roads were getting too muddy for the car. Furthermore, I saw that since it was 2:00 p.m. by now, it would be a late return to the car if I proceeded according to plan. I gave up the rest of the project and returned to the car. I had a struggle getting up and out to the car. My physical condition may have been the worse for a short night's sleep. I hit the road fifteen minutes' walk to the west of where I had parked the vehicle and I was glad I had gotten a compass bearing on Shinumo Altar.

Dragon and Crystal Creeks and the Tower of Ra
[May 29, 1966 to June 2, 1966]

Donald Davis and I got to the North Rim Campground Sunday evening in time for a cafeteria meal and a visit with James Richardson before and after his campfire lecture. On Monday morning we found the Tiyo Point Road in fairly good shape and did some looking from the point before driving back north two tenths of a mile to where we could find the car by lining up the Colonnade with Buddha Temple. Donald was carrying a heavy load of canned food for four days, but we made it to the takeoff point in 35 minutes. We got out on the promontory toward Shiva Saddle as usual, but when we were just reaching the top of the Coconino, Donald saw a band tailed pigeon leave a nest about 15 feet from our trail. We got close pictures of the nest and one egg. When we returned on Thursday, we got close to the brooding bird before she flew.

Down on the saddle, Donald immediately began seeing a lot of worked chips of chert. There were imperfect arrow heads and blades of various sorts. We had another look at the big mescal pit near the basin rocks. There was no water in the basin after the last three months of drought. However, there was still some buggy water in the waterhole where I had camped last summer and I believe this last eight inches will last until the summer rains start. Just east of this steep tributary, Donald inspected a solution hole that allowed him to crawl in about 30 feet. One pleasant discovery on our trip down the Supai slope was that there is a deer trail about three fourths of the way before it disappears.

When we came to the bed of Dragon Creek, we went on down past the deer trail that bypasses the fall to see the first obstruction. It dropped about 10 feet, not spectacular, but enough. When we got around this section down to the spring, we walked up the very impressive narrows to a higher fall. There was more willow and cut tail growth in the bed than I had remembered from last September and it took us an hour to get down to the junction of Dragon and Crystal Creeks. Something that made us wonder was the skid marks made by a helicopter landing about a quarter of a mile upstream from the junction. Beck's pilot had not put him down here, so it may have been Euler. We camped by a pile of large stones, a low cairn or fireplace on the east side of the creek just below the junction. Our bags were a bit too warm until late at night, but there were few if any mosquitoes.

On Tuesday morning we got off to a leisurely start about 8:30 a.m. and proceeded on up the wash that splits with one arm going to the Shiva Osiris Saddle and the other heading under the Osiris Ra Saddle. We left the bottom and climbed out to the southwest through a narrow fault ravine as I had done two years ago. Again we found traces of copper in the Tapeats.

We felt rather sure that the Stanton Kane Hislop Party had come down the Redwall just east of the end of this canyon head where there is quite a bit of vegetation and there are numerous ledges. When we got close, we found that Stanton's remark about having to jump down the last 15 feet was borne out. Donald was able to climb up over halfway but then he was stopped. As we were getting ready to retreat, he noticed that we could bypass this drop by going up the talus on the west and following a ledge around under the main fall to the east side. I could see form this higher station that the way ahead looked worse than I am used to climbing, and in order not to be completely frustrated for the day, I elected to go back down and head for the river along the Tonto to see how the party started their epochal hike.

The promontory that reaches north from Ra spreads out at the north end. I could now follow Stanton's field notes of his route to the top of the Redwall. They went up a talus at the east end of this wall to a shelf at the very base of the Redwall and then turned to the right toward the river, meaning that they were doubling back over the route that they had followed below along the Tonto. In this way they went west of the fin that projects about the middle of this north facing wall. Beyond this fin there is quite a bit of broken cliffs and ledges, but the prevailing gradient is even steeper than where I had declined to follow Donald. Especially toward the top, I would say that Stanton was not exaggerating the difficulties. They were three men of more daring than good judgment to even try this ascent.

(While we were away from camp, a group from Phoenix came by. They had come down Crystal Creek. After going up Dragon Creek a short way, they went to the river, crossed, and went out via Hermit Gorge. See Donald Weaver's story in Summit Magazine.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find a fair deer trail most of the way along the Tonto. I noted that there is no chance for a man to try a Redwall ascent anywhere closer to the river than the two ways we had seen. When Kane went off to try to climb the backbone, it was a feature of minor size along the route to the top that I noted on the north exposure of Redwall, not one of the promontories reaching west and south from Ra. I also noticed that one can climb out of the bottom of Crystal at two places along the west side of the course of the creek below the junction with Dragon. The upper one is where the tilted strata of Algonquin age angle up to the horizontal Tapeats, and the lower is quite close to the mouth of Crystal Creek. If I ever want to complete the traverse of the canyon below the north rim from one boundary of the park to the other, I could go from Crystal to Tuna by going up here and then west along the Tonto. Then I would need to complete only the gaps from Tuna to Flint and from Powell Saddle to the Thunder Spring Trail.

By map study I had placed Stanton's pictures across the river. Out on the next point, east of the Tapeats headland and right above the mouth of Crystal, I got pictures to match Stanton's. Back to the north, I had seen a good break through the Tapeats that angles down to the north. Before reaching the place, I found a break that is wider and more conspicuous from the mouth of Crystal. Since a good deer trail went down this one, and since I figure that the Stanton party would have come up here, I chose to descend this one. The way got steeper as I neared the bottom, but it was never really bad. I walked back up the creek to camp in just over two hours, and along the way I identified my camp of two years ago. Although I didn't reach camp until 5:45 p.m., Donald wasn't along until I really became worried.

He finally came in about 8:30 p.m. with a terrific tale to tell. He had succeeded in getting up the Redwall although at two or three places there was no alternative to the very difficult holds he had to use. When he was above the difficult parts but about 80 feet from the top of the Redwall, he had found and explored a fine cave. About 60 feet back where the daylight was about gone, he found a 14 inch olla and in a pack rat's nest were four corncobs showing eight to ten rows of kernels. Then he had gone on around the north side of Ra and had located the place where Stanton stood to take the picture showing Dragon Head and the knobs lined up in front of it. Then he succeeded in climbing the lower Supai cliffs and could walk south to the summit block of Ra. As was to be expected, this could not be climbed but he was able to come down to the Ra Osiris Saddle by an easier route. The sun was down long before he was off the cliffs and in the wash below.

Donald was quite sure he could take me up the route he had followed through the Redwall, so on Wednesday we gave it a try. I don't mind going up a place that may be vertical where the holds are good and frequent, but about halfway to the top we came to a place that was not very steep, but there was dirt over the friction holds. Donald had to give me a hand here, but only a few yards farther I met my Waterloo. He had jammed his fist into a crack and then had reached up with the left hand to a good hold which was three inches too much for me. I had to turn back and read my magazine while he went back to the cave to photograph the pot in it.

On Thursday just as we were packing up to leave, I saw a mine shaft against the cliffs across Dragon Creek and while Donald was coming to inspect it, he found a box of dynamite sticks under an overhang. The name Hercules was still very legible. We went out without undue fatigue and reached the car about 4:45 p.m.

On our walk down Dragon, we had an excellent look at a golden eagle.

We both came away thinking that Stanton, Hislop, and Kane were taking awful chances to go up the Redwall where they did and then bet their lives on getting down at a different place.

Bridge, Separation, Spencer, and Meriwitica Canyons
[June 4, 1966 to June 10, 1966]

As planned, Jorgen Visbak, Homer Morgan, John Harrington, and Bill Moos met me at Peach Springs about noon on Saturday. With only 30 hours notice, Jim Ervin had driven 840 miles to join us. Donald Davis was also taking advantage of the fact that I would leave my car at the head of the trail into Meriwitica Canyon. He was traveling by motor bike and I could accommodate his supplies in the trunk of my car. He hoped to find caves in the limestone of the area. Jim Ervin had come to get pictures of the area where he had left the river in late June of 1931 to climb out by what deputy sheriff Nelson called an impossible route. He had recently written an account of his near fatal adventure which had taken the life of his companion. They had become discouraged with trying to reach Boulder Dam by hoping freight trains and had heard of a boat at the mouth of Diamond Creek. They thought it would be easier to float downstream, but when they had lost an oar, Ervin decided to abandon the project and get help for his companion who was too weak to attempt the route up the cliffs. At the age of 31, just 35 years ago, Ervin was able to survive this exploit on almost no food and only the water that he could drink before starting away from a spring below the Redwall.

Donald told the down river floaters where to get the road down Peach Springs Wash and they got off soon after lunch. Ervin, Davis, and I started northwest on the reservation road on the other part of the combined trip. First Donald showed us how to get to the road that goes to Hindu Canyon. The Williams Quad map shows this going down into Hindu Canyon and up to the north skirting the head of Bridge Canyon and on out to an overlook opposite Separation Canyon. The turnoff from the main reservation road is clear, about seven miles from route 66, but after passing a mysterious modern building with a white tower, it looks no better than tracks to various cattle tanks. Familiarity with the map and a knowledge of directions should indicate which branch leads on to Hindu and Bridge Canyons. When Davis had taken us far enough to clear up the route, we went on to the Meriwitica Tank road and found the end above the route down into Meriwitica Canyon, west of the tank itself. We had wasted a little time taking a detour of three miles and back to Willow Spring, bone dry at this time. Along this road I had shaken the tail pipe loose from the muffler and I would have had trouble if Jim Ervin hadn't pulled out the right tools and fastened the pipe back in place. He impressed me as a very capable man in an emergency. I left Donald the key to my car trunk and went back to Ervin's car to take off for Bridge Canyon.

We drove to the rim above Hindu Canyon and left Ervin's car just before reaching a place where the road starts down a long grade. We had a map that Dock had furnished showing where the search party had gone down in 1931, but I didn't get in mind the fact that they had driven cars farther at the time than we had in 1966. When we had been walking down Hindu Canyon for nearly two hours and darkness was starting to settle down before we came to a turn to the north in the road, I began to feel that we might be going to the west of the head of Bridge Canyon. I called for a turn to the north up a draw although the road went on west. A few hundred yards up this draw, we noted a few deer trails, but no assurance that we were on the right route. When we stopped to eat, Ervin discovered that he had picked up only his bedroll and had left the only food he had brought along back at the car. He had purposely brought no water because he remembered a spring at the bottom of a long set of switchbacks. I gave him some of the food which I had figured would last seven days and he drank as much of my one and a half gallons of water as he could. He was walking well for a man of 66, but I could see that he might have a hard time getting out if he went the full distance that I was prepared to take on. He also showed that he would not be able to show me much about the route since he said that he was still too beat when he came with the rescue party 35 years ago to do much more than tag along. When we left his car, I figured that it would be safe for him to come back up Bridge Canyon alone if he took my gallon plastic jug of water, but now I changed my mind. I figured that I might have to skirmish quite a while before finding the head of the Bridge Canyon Trail and that we might not reach water before noon the next day. When I suggested that he allow me to go ahead and get the pictures he wanted while he went back to his car and civilization, he seemed happy enough to follow this idea. It was almost dark, but I figured he could reach the ar in two and a half hours and the lateness would simplify the thirst situation.

I went up the main draw that turned slightly to the east and finally came out on the rim of an impressive canyon which I took to be Bridge. In going up here, I detoured a bit and inspected a shelter cave that showed smoke on the ceilings. The rim to the east was still higher, and the head of the canyon was to the west, so the last daylight had directed me to go back down to the west. I thought I might just retreat to the road, but I followed the rim and soon came to the end of the two tracks where I suspected that morning light would show the beginning of the trail. Here I slept with the comfortable feeling that all was well for the next day.

On Sunday I saw that I had guessed right. There was a terrace for a shack, a wall for a corral, and the beginning of the trail going down through a slot in the Redwall. Little trail was left in the ravine, but below I went to the east on a 1500 foot descent and at the bottom near the remains of some floor tents was the spring with a cement catchment basin. I went on with more than enough water to see me down to the river even if I found no more. The wild burros in this section of the canyon have reached a saturation point and the trails are in a fine state of preservation. As was indicated on the map, the trail to Ervin's ascent led around the rim of the inner gorge to head the next canyon to the east. What surprised me most was the prevalence of water. Some was flowing below the Tapeats in a minor gorge between Bridge and the one I had to head, and Ervin's spring at the base of the Redwall was quite a little brook which made a pleasant sound as it came over the ledges from above. I could see the ravine with the wet vegetation he described, and around to the southwest, I could see where he had actually gone up. There were a couple of rather continuous small cliffs where a route was not apparent, but most of the way to the top would be well within my capability as a climber. Maybe Davis or Cureton would like to try this place. I would rate it as more promising than where Stanton, Hislop, and Kane went up and down the same formation. Out on the rim of the inner gorge, I could see the rectangular rock that projects into the river and I saw a logical route up to the Tonto Platform. Everything was just as clear as if Ervin had come with me. I was impressed with the clarity of his memory of the area. Of course, he had seen the situation once when his life was in doubt and then again four days later, but 35 years usually plays tricks with the memory. At first I had thought that I would go down to the river at Bridge Canyon City on the old trail. The catch was that I had forgotten its precise location, and to complicate things, I had picked the wrong canyon on the north side of the river as Separation. I hadn't yet seen the real Separation and I concluded that one entering the Colorado only a little way below Bridge Canyon was Separation. In going to the west, I saw a chance to get across Bridge Canyon with breaks in both Tapeats walls. When I reached the bed of Bridge, I changed my mind and decided to try going on down to the river. There was one place where I preferred going down experimentally without my pack, and then I decided to make sure there were no other bad spots before I went back for the pack. In going back, I happened to glance up a side ravine to the east and saw what gives the canyon its name, a natural bridge. It is only an easy ten minutes from the river.

The mouth of what I took to be Separation was in plain sight from the bank at Bridge. I saw at once that the air mattress floating was different here from what I had done in Marble. I had to push off into some rough water and float through with the mattress crosswise. I like to keep my feet up and my body on the mattress, but soon I was hanging with my feet straight down. It was a bit disturbing to struggle up to proper paddling position lengthwise on the mattress only to encounter another rapid before I could land and warm up. I did land just upstream from the mouth of what I had taken as Separation, but when I pushed off to get around a projecting rock, the current caught me and swept me by before I had time to see whether my friends were there. This further disturbed my piece of mind, and I landed quite soon on the south bank where a ravine came down to the water. I was so cold that I shivered for ten minutes. This experience shook my enthusiasm for floating in this section at this stage of the river. I learned later that the other four floaters were in fine spirits and were thoroughly enjoying the trip. Their surf rider floats and foot flippers worked fine. However, Jorgen went through Diamond Creek Rapids on what was intended to be only a practice start and was unable to take a pair of shorts he had left in the car. When I remarked that Diamond rapids looked shallow and that I would be afraid of hitting rocks, he said that he had scraped on a couple with no harm done. Apparently the proselytes are now better believers than the missionary.

The beach where I had accidentally landed was quite interesting. I found a trail leading up to a couple of terraces to the east and a further trail going to the igneous cliff, probably for the purpose of mining although I could see no shaft. On Monday morning I went up to the Tonto Level and walked a bit to the west. I could now see that the real Separation Canyon was quite a distance downstream. If I had brought my pack up with me, I would have continued along the fine burro trail over to Bridge Canyon City where the other men had spent Sunday night. I know that Mrs. Lamb would be up late Monday afternoon, and I wanted to be on my beach when the boats came along. I spent the day finishing my Time Magazine including all the ads and letters to the editor. Eventually, the boat arrived and took several of the visitors up to float through Mile 234 Rapid. Then they took me aboard and down to Separation where we all had a wonderful steak dinner with tossed green salad and baked potatoes.

On Tuesday morning, Bill Moos and John Harrington went back to Las Vegas with the boat. Jorgen, Homer, and I waited until the boat party was about ready to leave and thus got off to a late (9:00 a.m.) start up Separation. I carried about a gallon of water, Homer two quarts, and Jorgen one quart. There were spots of running water in the bed until we were about a half hour from the river, below a row of impressive holes in the deep brown sandstone 200 feet up on the east. The day was hot and there was no more evidence of water. I was glad I had water to share with Jorgen, but all of our water was gone at least an hour before we got back to the supply in the creek.

With such a late start, I had no ambition to do more than get up through the Redwall, and as a limited objective, I figured that it would be satisfactory if I could photograph a possible way. We were glad that I had Reilly's information that the west and north arms are to be ruled out at once. We probably would have gone up the north arm with no advance information. About 15 minutes past the west arm, we reached the first obstruction, a narrow channel leading into the gray limestone. I would have started up the clay slopes to either side, but Homer went right in. Jorgen gave him a boost and then he pulled us up bodily. Not too much farther on we came to a long winding narrows in an 80 foot formation. I, with my usual pessimism, announced that the odds were 9:1 that it wouldn't go through and that we would have to retrace our steps to climb around the rim. Homer led us in. The question was in doubt for at least a quarter mile, but finally he showed that one can walk right up on a bed of gravel.

Not far beyond the mouth of the north arm, Homer stepped very close to the tail of a rattlesnake that had its head under a rock. It didn't rattle until Homer tossed a couple of small pebbles at it. I noted a couple of places on the north wall of the canyon where an expert climber could probably go up the Redwall, but by keeping to the the branch to the east, one can go right on up out of the Redwall along the gravel and boulder strewn bed. Time was running out especially in view of the water shortage. While Jorgen rested in the shade of a very interesting narrows in the Redwall, I went ahead and climbed up a bushy slope to get a view ahead while Homer went ahead along the bed. It was interesting to see that on the north side of the Colorado, the upper formations are still intact. I could see the Hermit Shale with a long white cliff above, the Coconino Sandstone (thin) combined with the Kaibab Limestone. Over to the northeast, I could see a rockslide through all this upper cliff. If I ever come in by car, it ought to be easy to come down and reach the place we turned back. Separation is a long and impressive canyon. One wonders whether the Howlands and Dunn were playing the percentages right when they assumed that they could climb out. They picked the right canyon, but how could they have known.

Even my 59 year old timidity couldn't see much danger in Separation Rapid on a mattress. However, I figured a way to beat the cold water. The Las Vegas party were going to stash their surf floats and swim fins at the mouth of Spencer Canyon and get them later by boat. Since there was no extra carrying involved, I borrowed one of the floats used by Harrington and Mooz and put it on top of my regular mattress. I was able to lie up high and dry with my only worry the matter of tipping over. At a couple of boils, this was a real problem, but almost all the time we had a peaceful 6.4 mile float. There was a good current, but I could have gone to sleep on my soft bed. We stopped on three nice beaches before we reached Spencer Canyon. I didn't eat all my lunch until I reached the spring water coming out of Spencer because I had had 12 hours of intestinal trouble from using Colorado River water. Apparently my five year old Halazone tablets have lost their potency,

There was no problem in recognizing the mouth of Spencer since there is a prominent lava deposit on the north bank opposite. You see the bells peak in the Redwall as you float down the Colorado, and you expect fine scenery. Spencer fulfills all expectations and then some. Verdure also lines the bank and slows the walker. About two hours walk upstream, past a small fall or two, and past a dry wash from the west, you come to the mouth of Meriwitica. It is easily identified by the small tower of granite with the creek bed split around it. Homer spotted some tools used by a prospector cached high on this castle. He took the shovel to help level his bed site and also to help in the construction of a dam which held enough water to let us float, a cooling process that all enjoyed a couple of times a day. We camped at the big cottonwoods upstream from the mouth of Meriwitica. One memorable view was obtained from the Tonto level several hundred feet above our camp. We could look around in the evening light at the Bells and other pinnacles on both sides of Spencer and Meriwitica. The downhill side of the travertine deposit left by the Meriwitica Spring was amazing. There must be a greater volume of natural cement here, roughly 350 feet deep and hundreds of acres in extent, larger then in any man made structure in the world. It has a little brother formed by the spring one and a half miles farther up Spencer, but the Meriwitica Spring must use have left 100 times as much travertine. A caver could go wild wondering where the lime has come from.

On Thursday, Homer took us up to look at the travertine formed by Spencer Spring. There are some most peculiar walls on top of the deposit. The best preserved goes for quite a few yards fairly straight and ends at the rim above the cliff. I remembered stories of Indians driving stampeding buffalo over a cliff. A roofless rock house back near the upper spring has been occupied by a white prospector. On his former trip, Homer found a can with a note in it reading "So much damn country and no blankety blank gold." On our way down, Homer showed us a good cave that John and he had found. It is rather near the top and is north of the big gray hollow in the east facing wall. One can enter it about 100 feet and walk around a solid center of the largest chamber. It is well decorated with speleothems, many of which ring as you tap them. Slightly lower on the route down, Homer pointed out a six inch entrance with bees entering in a steady procession. On our way back to camp, we disturbed a pair of slate dark hawks with banded tails and light colored beaks. They were apparently trying to keep our attention away from a nest in a tall cottonwood that Homer spotted.

After lunch we walked up to Meriwitica Spring, using the trail which is fairly well defined on the talus south of the travertine cliff. The grove nourished by the spring is an amazing place. It is about 50 yards wide and 200 yards long, but we saw birds of several species including one bright red male. Within minutes Homer was watching a little kit fox and we saw a couple of young jackrabbits as we walked north to the Indian shelter cave.

It is quite a scramble up to the cave but the trip is most rewarding. There are outlines of numerous dwellings. Pot hunters have combed the site. The neatest signatures are printed with charcoal or pencil and read "W. H. Riddenhour, J. Tillman; Dec. 9, 1879." There are still plenty of corncobs around of 8 to 12 rows and a few sherds. After a mosquito infested night, we walked out in fine style Friday morning.

I had been worrying slightly about the safety of Jim Ervin in getting back to his car at night without water, but when we reached my car I learned from a note written by Donald Davis that he had been extremely worried about my safety. He drove clear to Kingman to alert the sheriff, who had then called my wife and had come out with three deputies to the place where we were to come out. Ervin had also thought that Donald and he should go down the Bridge Canyon Trail looking for me, but Donald assured him that I was used to looking out for myself in the wilderness. The search and rescue squad got in on the act and took their Jeeps down Peach Springs Wash to check that there really was a Rambler station wagon parked at the river. They came back predicting that a tow truck would be needed to get it through the loose gravel where the road follows the bed of the wash. Homer was a little worried also and he had me stop five and a half miles from the river. We carried our lunch to eat beside the Colorado after a cooling dip. Homer also packed my tire chains along as a last resort if he should begin spinning the wheels. On the way down, we threw many rocks out of the high center and in one spot we filled some holes with flat rocks. It paid off since Homer brought the Rambler right through without a hitch.

Donald quieted the search considerably when he spotted a letter in my parked car saying that Mrs. Elinor Lamb of Las Vegas was going to supply the party by boat on Monday evening. Evidently the sheriff reached her and learned that I had safely joined the party and that the last three were not expected out until Saturday.

North Rim to Olla Vieja Cave and Tower of Ra
[May 29, 1966 to June 2, 1966]
(written by Donald Davis)

Harvey Butchart and I slept at the North Rim campground the night of May 29, 1966 after driving from Flagstaff. The following morning we drove out the fire road to Tiyo Point, and after enjoying the view briefly, retreated some one half mile to park the car about 9:00 a.m. From here we walked about a mile west, crossing several shallow canyons, to the point that leads down to the saddle between Shiva Temple and the North Rim. While descending this point, just east of the ridge and just above the Coconino, I flushed a banded tail pigeon from its nest on a horizontal limb of a juniper about six feet above the ground. The nest held a moderately heavily incubated egg which we photographed. (On our return June 2, 1966, by quiet approach, we were able to get within 10 feet of the incubating pigeon and photograph her on the nest.) Naturalist James Richardson had two reports of pigeons on the North Rim last year, but could not recall any nest record for the Park offhand; however, Birds of Arizona (Phillips et al., 1964) lists the species as common in the juniper oak manzanita zone in Arizona. Our nest was about 7200 feet in this zone.

The Coconino is broken down into a steep ridge which leads easily down to the Supai Sandstone forming the broad Shiva Saddle. Harvey showed me a particularly large and striking mescal pit toward the center of the saddle. Nearby are potholes in sandstone which provide water after storms, but which were dry at this time. There must have been very large Indian camps here at times; I have never seen a place so littered with worked stone chips. In addition to innumerable chert fragments scattered over several acres, we found two scrapers, the bases of two arrowheads, and about three small obsidian flakes which must have been brought from many miles away. Relics of the 1937 Shiva Temple Expedition were also noted; I saw a few tin cans and an olive green wine bottle with a broken neck.

Harvey's route to Dragon Creek starts near the narrow point of the saddle and descends into the bed of the gorge leading northwest from it; this route is surprisingly easy, with no cliffs encountered anywhere. A deer trail may be followed most of the way through the Supai before it dissipates. In the upper Redwall are a few smallish cave openings mostly choked with a semi consolidated yellowish sandy fill; I could not enter those I tried for more than 20 feet. Just below these are potholes with a little stagnant seep water which we did not drink. Where this gorge begins to widen out into the valley of Dragon Creek, I heard sharp whistles of a large rodent from a rocky ridge to the north. It sounded much like a marmot, though perhaps more insistently repetitious than the marmots I have heard in Colorado. Since I understand marmots are considered to be extinct in northern Arizona (Journal. Mamm., May 1956), I tried to get near enough to observe this animal, but could not make a conclusive sighting.

Shortly after we reached the dry section of Dragon Creek, a Golden Eagle flew down canyon not more than 30 feet above the wash bed and 50 feet from us. (Since George Beck and I saw a pair in Phantom Creek in March, it seems likely there is at least one nest somewhere in this general area of the Park.) Where Dragon Wash enters the Tapeats, we followed a deer trail up to the east to avoid drop offs in the bed. The trail reenters the bed at Dragon Spring, which wells from fractures in the Tapeats and nourishes attractive groves of fairly large cottonwoods, boxelders, and brush, closely enclosed between the dark brown cliffs. The flow of Dragon Creek averaged three to four feet wide and was about comparable to Wall Creek; Crystal Creek was producing much less, more nearly the equivalent of Ribbon Creek. These niggardly flows seem rather surprising in view of the extent of the Hindu Amphitheater. We camped at an old stone fireplace a few yards east of Crystal Creek just below the Crystal Dragon junction, at about 4:00 p.m. Harvey found an unusual soapstone pendant across the creek from camp, and I found an obsidian flake nearby. A major object of this trip was to try to determine the route followed by the R. B. Stanton party when then tried in 1890 to climb to the Canyon rim in this area. To this end, Dock Marston had furnished me with a copy of Stanton's photo labeled 354 486. Comparing this with modern maps, Harvey and I concluded independently that it must have been taken from somewhere above the Redwall on the north end of the Tower of Ra (or the promontory that reaches north from Ra, as Harvey described it); and we suspected from Stanton's notes and book that his descent might have been made at the head of the gorge north of the saddle between Osiris Temple and Ra. On May 31 we left camp around 8:20 a.m. to investigate this gorge. The weather was relatively cool and we easily reached the base of the Redwall, where we were halted for a time by a cliff about 15 feet high across the wash bed. Above this, a few hundred feet north of the gorge head on the Osiris side, the Redwall cliff was just slanting enough and broken enough to suggest something less than an even chance of climbing it without equipment. We finally saw that the lowest cliff could be bypassed by scrambling up a slope on the Ra side and traversing a ledge which reentered the bed above. (We decided that this was probably the cliff where Stanton had to be lowered by a strap. Coming from above they would not have had a clear view of it, and on reaching the drop would be likely not to have noticed the alternate ledge route they had already passed.) However, at this point Harvey decided he would probably not be able to manage the climb above, while I did not want to turn back without studying it as closely as possible. Accordingly, we decided to separate, and he would try to work out the section of Stanton's route closer to the River. After contouring around the ledge to the east (Osiris) side of the gorge, I found that there were good holds and that the climb was a bit less formidable than it had looked from a distance. There were about five short bare rock pitches, but only one, near the middle of the Redwall, was really thought provoking. The climb topped out on a minor point divided from the main mass of Osiris by a draw. Looking across the draw to the east side, I could see a triangular cave entrance several feet high, about 80 feet below the top of the Redwall and located on a minor normal fault striking roughly E W or NE SW and dipping about 80? N., with a few feet downward displacement to the north. I did not think the cave would be sizable, but decided to check it as I felt that such a site was a likely place to find untouched split twig figurines or pottery. This suspicion proved to be prophetic.

After crossing the draw, I reached the opening by scrambling up a low cliff and traversing a brushy ledge to the north. Inside, the cave opened into a chamber about 20 feet wide and high enough in a few places to stand in. About 60 feet from the entrance, in a pocket among breakdown blocks on the floor, I encountered a large prehistoric olla lying on its side, sunk three or four inches in pack rat droppings. It was in one piece although the lower side had a crack extending almost to the base. It was about 14 inches high and 14 inches wide with a ten inch wide mouth, and was coiled and indented grayware (probably Tusayan Corrugated, according to George Gumerman, acting Curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Northern Arizona, to whom I later described it). The olla was empty except for a little debris, but I found four small corncobs (three with eight rows of kernels, and one with ten) in pack rat nests elsewhere in the cave. This find brings to at least three the number of pots known to have been found in the Grand Canyon, the others being found by Peter Berry below the South Rim in the late 1800's (photo in Burton Holmes Travelogues, 1901, p. 190) and one found by Western Speleological Institute more than 10 years ago (G.C.N.P. archeological site number. 606) in Grapevine Canyon. The Osiris location is easily the least accessible of these sites, being almost midway between the rim where the canyon is nine miles wide, and seemingly approachable by only three ways: from Crystal Creek by the Stanton route; from Phantom Creek by a Redwall climb and a long traverse south of Shiva Temple; or over or around Shiva Temple from the Shiva North Rim Saddle or from Dragon Creek. I marvel that the Indians could have gotten such a delicate item to the cave unbroken, and believe the only way in which it could safely be removed intact would be by landing a helicopter on the Ra Osiris Saddle or on a small Redwall bench nearer the cave, and backpacking the olla, well padded, to the helicopter.

I decided to refer to the cave as Olla Vieja Cave (roughly, Old Jar Caves), as the simpler term Olla Cave had been pre emptied by Western Speleological Institute for their site. The cave is of some interest in itself. It is apparently the longest dry Redwall cave yet found below the North Rim. I explored some 300 to 400 feet or passage. Beyond the olla, the main passage narrows and divides into two crawl ways, rejoins after a few yards, and continues, with a slight left ward bend, for at least 20 feet as a passage too low to enter without excavating pack rat deposits. Back near the entrance, an opening on the right (as one faces the cave) reveals a spacious chamber whose cliff ward side contains stalactites and stalagmites up to a foot long. Some of the stalactites hang from peculiar mammillary bases which are apparently of aerogenic rather than subsaqueous origin. From the inner end of this chamber, two passages continue about SSE, roughly parallel with the cliff face: an open , dust floored broachway to the right; and a narrower, breakdown interrupted passage, at a slightly higher level, to the left. The former ends after about 100 to 150 feet. The latter, after continuing a comparable distance, forks to form two narrow crawl ways which were too difficult for me to enter while alone and with limited time. Though much modified by breakdown, and by accumulations of rat debris and dust, the cave is definitely of solutional origin. Fractures in the ceilings have been irregularly widened, and the passages beyond the stalactite chamber show directionally oriented flutes and scallops, which indicate former flow in the SSE direction (toward the River, but opposed to the slope of the side canyon in which the cave now opens). This is the only dry Redwall cave in which I have seen scalloping.

I left, with the intention of returning the following day to photograph the olla after seeking advice on camera settings from Harvey. I then rounded the head of the gorge between Ra and Osiris and examined three openings in the upper Redwall on the east side of Ra. These all ended in fill after 20 to 40 feet and had no visible artifacts, but the northernmost contained a layer of ash, suggesting that its pack rat guano had burned at one time.

From here it was a simple walk around the Redwall rim to the north end of Ra. I found that a number of vague foreground objects in Stanton's photo were recognizable as sections of the Redwall cliff top, and that I could obtain a view matching his by standing a few yards below the lowest Supai cliff and somewhat to the west of center of the north end of Ra. Relationships of features were definitely altered if I moved as much as 50 feet from the spot I chose to duplicate his photo. Stanton must have used a very wide angle lens; I needed four shots to include the important parts of his picture and would have needed six if I had covered the lower left and lower right corners. Unfortunately, certain foreground points at the bottom of the picture, which were in my viewfinder, did not quite appear on the negative. I noted with interest that many of the juniper trees in Stanton's scene corresponded with living trees of about the same size. The summit of Dragon Head appears more rounded and broader now than in Stanton's photo; I cannot account for this.

It seems that the Stanton Party camped below this slope on the flat top of the prominent Redwall point extending north from the west side of the north end of Ra. (Harvey decided their climb up the Redwall must have been almost directly below this point, not on the one of those nearer the River.) I would have liked to go look for relics, but decided I should use my time examining the upper parts of Ra as thoroughly as possible. Just above the photo slope was a chimney by which I could climb above the first Supai cliff, but not on up to the point at the north end of the Ra ridge. After scouting traverses a few hundred feet out onto the west side of Ra at two levels, I concluded that this side was almost certainly unclimbable, and walked around the east side one third mile until directly below the saddle between the main and north summits of Ra. I then scrambled easily up to the saddle and ridge. I first went south to the base of the main summit block and walked around it in a clockwise direction. At its east and west corners, I found chimneys where I was able to climb about one fourth of the way up, but had to turn back, as there were problems I did not dare attempt without protection. Even if I had been able to gain the next ledge, the second cliff above might well have proved impassable. Giving up these climbs, I walked the ridge across the small rise of the north summit and out to the point at the extreme north end of the ridge. I saw no cairns or other signs of previous visitation here. As the sun was dropping low, I walked back to the saddle in the center of the Ra ridge and rather than go back to the chimney at the north end (where I had left a cairn in case I needed to relocate it), I descended to the east as far as possible and traversed a ledge in the lower Supai south to the Ra Osiris saddle. From there I went to the Redwall climb and retraced it down with little difficulty, guided by three cairns I had left on the way up. I did not reach camp until darkness had fallen, about an hour after I had agreed tobe back, but was in time to forestall Harvey's leaving to organize a rescue.

An anonymous note had been left in our camp during our absence, admonishing us to remove or bury our rubbish. This was evidently from one of Bill Sewrey's party from Phoenix; they had gone in a day before we did from the west side of Crystal Creek. The next day they passed by again, and once more missed us. They were obviously puzzled as to our identities.

The morning of June 1st, Harvey and I started back toward the cave for photography. I thought he could do the Redwall climb, since I considered it a little easier than the one he had done out of Phantom Canyon near the Shiva Isis saddle, but he lacked a few inches of the reach required to make the worst pitch safely, and had to turn back and wait at the cliff base for me. I went on to the cave and made several tries to photograph the olla in situ by carbide light, one of which turned out fairly well (f.3.5 at 1 second). I then removed the olla and corncobs carefully to the entrance, took a shot in the shade and one in the sun, and replaced the artifacts in their original locations. After rejoining Harvey, he and I went around to investigate the gorge which climbs up to the west side of the Shiva Osiris saddle. We established that Stanton could not possibly have descended here, as there is sheer cliff all around its head. On the north facing slope of this gorge is the best growth of grass I have seen in the sub Redwall parts of Grand Canyon.

I am satisfied now that Stanton's party not only did not make the circuitous and difficult climb of Osiris, but probably did not even reach the north summit of Ra. The photo level was probably the highest reached. From there an easy walk around the corner to the east would have shown them the Redwall route down from the Ra Osiris saddle (which looks easier from above then from below), and after having spent a waterless night atop the Redwall, they probably would have headed for this without further cliff climbing digressions. Thus, they probably walked only about a mile along the top of the Redwall, but their climbs up and down it were respectable achievements, and Stanton's notes (though not his book) seemed accurate, although vague. The next morning Harvey noticed a prospect hole in the Hakatai (?) just north of Dragon Creek near the Crystal Creek junction, and I found a box of old dynamite, with the faded stencil Hercules Dynamite, under an overhang 100 feet to the east. I am fairly sure this does not date back to Stanton's time. We made an uneventful hike out and reached the car in mid afternoon. On his separate hike on May 31st, Harvey had determined the spot from which Stanton took his other photograph looking across the River from the Tonto Platform east of the mouth of Crystal, and found the break they probably used to climb to it. Thus, the true route of the Stanton Kane Bislop excursion seems rather well established now.

Meriwitica and Spencer Canyon areas, Western Grand Canyon
[June 4, 1966 to June 8, 1966]
(written by Donald G. Davis)

After our recent trip to the Tower of Ra area, Harvey Butchart intended to join some other men for some air mattress floating down the western part of the Grand Canyon, and I took the opportunity to use his parked car as base camp for a few days of exploring and cave hunting in the region of Meriwitica and Spencer Canyons. I left Flagstaff on my slow motorcycle about 8:00 a.m., an hour or more before Harvey, but we arrived almost simultaneously in Peach Springs before noon, in time for a brief meeting with the others of the party. There were four plus Jim Ervin, who had been in communication with Dock Marston about a river tragedy that Ervin had survived in 1931. Ervin and a partner had begun an ill prepared boat trip from Diamond Creek, and before reaching Bridge Canyon, Ervin had to leave the other man and hike out, at great peril, to Peach Springs. The other was missing when Ervin returned with a rescue party and was never found.

The four floaters left in a station wagon for their starting point at Peach Springs Wash. Harvey had decided to join them downriver by way of Bridge Canyon, and Ervin was to accompany him partway. Harvey and Ervin, in separate cars, and I followed the road leading NW into the Hualapai reservation. Seven miles from the highway the road to Bridge Canyon area leads north marked by a small sign FAA Vortac. (This is a cryptic modern building with a conical white tower, standing in a flat about two miles from the junction.) I led Harvey and Ervin far enough along this road to pass the two confusing forks which are not on maps; then we went back and continued to the head of the Meriwitica Canyon Trail (with a fruitless side trip to the dry willow spring). At 4:00 p.m., Harvey left his car there, with the intention of coming out that way on June 11; then Ervin drove with him back toward Bridge Canyon.

I had information on Spencer and Meriwitica Springs from USGS Water Supply Paper 1576 A, and decided to backpack into this area for two or three days. I started down the trail about 6:00 p.m. The upper part has been built where the spectacular Meriwitica monocline has broken down the Redwall and lower cliffs, and descends in two long slopes with a switchback to the bed of the monocline controlled tributary, where it abruptly disappears. It looks as if the original intent was to build a wagon road into Meriwitica Canyon, but if so, it was never completed. The rest of the way one follows wash beds or animal trails. Meriwitica Canyon is overrun with wild burros and horses; I saw no more than three burros and six horses at any one time, but all reasonably level areas are trampled and laced with trails, and the ground between the desert shrubs virtually denuded of grass. I reached Meriwitica Spring and its lovely cottonwood grove just before dark, and camped NW of the spring.

This section of the Grand Canyon is of very different aspect from the National Park and less known, but in my opinion it is of equal interest and in some ways even more strange and other worldly. The vegetation is more typically Lower Sonoran, with crucifixion thorn (Canotia), creosote bush, Ocotillo, and California barrel cactus prominent. Above the Tonto group the sandstones are absent; the Muav is thicker, a thick Devonian limestone lies between it and the Redwall, and above the Redwall the mesa tops are capped by bedded Pennsylvanian limestone in place of the lower Supai. The twilight scene down the level alluvial floor of Meriwitica Canyon to the 2000 foot limestone wall beyond the spring grove is a very fair prospect, with no hint of the chasm which drops off below the enormous spring produced travertine dam which has held back the alluvium upstream, in much the same way as the lava at Toroweap. The effect is vaguely suggestive of southern Utah.

The spring is not yet depositing travertine where it emerges in a grape hung bower from talus below the Rampart Cave member of the Muav. There it averages about four feet wide and several inches deep, with a fairly rapid flow, but after it has run a few hundred feet, it spreads our over the travertine and sinks. Oddly, it does not reappear at once in the Tapeats bedrock of the gorge below the travertine dam; only a stagnant pool was visible from atop the dam. In view of this isolation of the spring by a cliff and dry canyons from Spencer Creek and the River, I was surprised to find in its waters an abundance of tiny fish up to three inches long. It would be interesting to know if they are a form endemic, perhaps, to this spring only. Also plentiful were small toads which hopped about rustling the dry leaves at night. Mosquitoes, while not abundant, bit persistently and badly impaired my sleep.

There are old ditches, flattened wire fences and old stone ruins SW of the spring, with some kitchen utensils and screw top bottles most of which look no more than perhaps 30 years old. A remnant of the sun purpled whiskey flask is more likely to be 60 or more years old, however. At the south end of the travertine dam fences block the approaches to burro trails which can be followed either north down to the gorge below the dam; or east around contours above the Tapeats toward Spencer Spring, about three miles away by foot. I set out for the latter early on June 5 and was able to keep to passable trails most of the way.

The travertine deposits at Spencer Spring are smaller than at Meriwitica and are restricted to the west side of Spencer Canyon, which they do not block. The deposits form three or four distinct terraces rising some 400 feet above the canyon floor. Water now emerges only on the lowest two and only in small amounts, and sinks before reaching the canyon bed. It does not reappear for a mile down Spencer Canyon, where a larger stream two feet wide rises at the junction with a dry canyon from the east. Cottonwoods begin only below this. Two burros with a baby one were sheltering in the brush at Spencer Spring; they had befouled the water, and I had to dig a hole among the water plants as high up as possible to get a clean drink. Atop the lowest, broadest travertine terrace is a stone ruin, with some kitchen utensils in a shelter cave behind, and old stone walls (which may have been corrals) toward the cliff edge. I noted with surprise a forlorn survivor of cultivation, a struggling fig plant three feet high, growing from barren decomposed travertine about 50 feet from the ruin. The failure of settlement attempts at Spencer and Meriwitica Springs may be due to the poorness of the soil, which seems to be little more than a thin layer of powdered calcite. The dried remnants of old limestone dams, much the worse for weathering and trampling, attest to the former occurrence of much larger flows of water at both springs.

I could not find any caves in the Rampart Cave member of the Muav above Spencer Spring, though there were a number of short solution tunnels some of which were lined with several inches of calcite crust of subaqueous origin. I spent several hours, however, investigating caves in the lowest travertine cliff. These are apparently of constructional origin, formed by roofing of spaces with canopies of travertine. Delicate networks of fossilized roots and twigs are common in them. The longest I found was toward the north end of the cliff, near the top. It had two entrances and about 150 feet of passage, consisting of a barren outer chamber and two inner chambers heavily decorated with old, flaking drip stone and pool deposits. In pack rat nests it had many small eight to twelve row corncobs and pieces of cane. These were present, in fact, in most of the caves, and in many there were arrangements of stones vaguely suggesting storage cysts. If so, however, they were rifled long ago. I found no potsherds. Another conspicuous cave farther south, in the east facing wall near the top, was accessible from below; it had two openings, was about 80 feet long, and contained several foot wide clusters of Corynorhinus (?) bats with many naked babies. In holes on the cliff outside the main entrance were two colonies of honeybees. (I also saw honeybees drinking and working catclaw flowers in Meriwitica Canyon. I have not yet seen them in the National Park section of the Canyon.) Near the cliff base below this cave I found and photographed the skull of a bighorn sheep.

In a north facing shelter cave in the north end of the cliff I made a particularly interesting discovery. A stick about one inch long by two inches wide, with a burned end (apparently an Indian torch, perhaps prehistoric) had been jammed obliquely into a hole in the ceiling, and a hummingbird's nest (presumably Costa's or Black chinned) had been built on the outer end. It contained two large young. My photograph of it unfortunately turned out blank. This curious nest site is similar to two found by Cave Research Associates in the eastern Grand Canyon (Cave notes, v. 3 no 5, Sept. 1961, p. 38).

Returning toward Meriwitica Spring in late afternoon, I enjoyed some striking views down Spencer Canyon, with ocotillos and barrel cacti outlined above the shadowed Tapeats nearby, and great Redwall peaks east of lower Spencer Canyon glowing in the light opposite. On a promontory about one third mile southeast of the Meriwitica travertine dam, above the Tapeats, I found a plastic covered box, about nine inches square, containing electronic parts and labeled U.S. Army Signal Corps, Modulator, Radiosonde: seemingly the payload from a weather balloon. It was too badly weathered to be of any value. I got back to camp in time to scramble up the long talus to the enormous shelter cave in the Muav of the west wall of Meriwitica Canyon opposite the spring. On a ledge on the north side of the cave is the best built cliff dwelling I have seen in the Grand Canyon. In addition, there are remnants of two walls just below the cave, two more about halfway up the talus slope inside, and another where the cave levels off for 20 feet at the top before ending. There were corn husks, cane fragments, and fairly large corncobs strewn about, and I saw a few bits of blackened, non corrugated pottery. Someone has done a good deal of crude looking digging, and a shovel and broken rake have been left.

I spent the morning of June 6 in leisurely wandering around the Meriwitica Spring grove, observing the interesting wildlife. The evening before, I had seen two kit foxes, so unsuspicious that they would freely go about their business while I followed 50 feet behind, and one of them appeared again. (One of these may be the little coyote seen by Harvey's party.) A remarkable variety of birds inhabit this tiny riparian oasis. I saw a family of Gambel's Quail, a Ladder backed Woodpecker (female); an Ash throated Flycatcher; a Western Wood Peewee; Blue gray Gnatcachers (very common); a Phainopepla (probably; it was too distant to be certain); a Scott's Oriole (male); two Common Cowbirds; two Cooper's Tanagers (pair, or possibly male with immature); and several house finches. A notable sight as I walked upcanyon on the way out was a Hereford bull which had somehow managed to go wild here.

As I plodded up the upper part of the trail in the afternoon, a human figure appeared briefly on the skyline at the trailhead. I was braced to be upbraided by the Hualapai for trespassing, but it turned out to be Jim Ervin with a startling story to tell. He had hiked three miles down the Hindu Canyon road toward Bridge Canyon with Harvey two nights ago; they had parted at dusk, and Harvey left the road and went toward a saddle that Ervin was so sure would not lead to the river that he drove to Kingman and reported to the Mohave Co.. Sheriff (Floyd L. Cisney) that Harvey was in trouble! On Monday Ervin returned to the Meriwitica trailhead and waited several hours until I came up. He urged me to go with him to Bridge Canyon to search, and in momentary confusion I started off with him; but I soon decided his grounds for concern were not very good, and I didn't know the Bridge Canyon Trial and was unprepared for it, so I sent back to Harvey's car. I advised Ervin to drive back to the edge of Hindu Canyon to see if Harvey had come back that way, and then if he still felt there was real cause for alarm, to return for me by 10:00 a.m. next day. After he left, I still had time to walk out along the Redwall rim east of Meriwitica Canyon for about two miles, to see if I could find a way to cave entrances I had seen from below. I could not enter them, but one recess in the rim contained a pocket of light reddish and whitish sediments resembling the Hindu Canyon fluvial beds of the area farther east. Possibly the apparent scarcity of caves in this area is due to filling by these sediments. Along this canyon rim, about one and a half miles from the car, I found two crumpled wing tanks, some 10 to 15 feet long, which had evidently been jettisoned from an airplane. They were about 300 feet apart and a similar distance back from the cliff edge.

The next day Ervin did not come to my camp, but the sheriff and three special deputies did. They had also had a report from a Peach Springs school teacher about the station wagon left at the bottom of Peach Springs Wash. To my chagrin, the only one of Harvey's companions whose name I could remember was John Harrington, and the only pertinent detail I knew of their plans was that Harvey was due back out Saturday, June 11. This, however, was important, since they said Ervin had told them Harvey was to have been out the past Monday! I explained that Harvey was the recognized champion of Grand Canyon back country hikers, and we all agreed that it would be unwise to mount an all out search until after Saturday, as there were still no solid grounds for believing Harvey lost (though, if he had been, Saturday would probably been too late). I led them on a walk along the rim to see the jettisoned wing tanks, after which they left.

All these visits had cut considerably into my intended cave hunting time, but after the sheriff left I was able to investigate a large opening visible in the Muav at the head of a short tributary of Meriwitica Canyon across from the trailhead. A ledge on the north wall of the tributary canyon led toward the hole, but appeared to be interrupted by unclimbable spots. After dropping into Meriwitica Canyon and climbing laboriously up to the ledge, I found this appearance was not deceptive; I could not get within 200 feet of the cavity. Probably, however, it was only the result of weathering along seeps in a silty zone of the Muav; there were several seeps, enough to wet the rock, above the ledge at the same level. Wasps were drinking at them, and a man might be able to get enough to survive by chipping V shaped undercuts with a rock hammer, if for some reason he could not reach Meriwitica Spring three miles away. On this nearly inaccessible ledge, I saw mountain sheep droppings, tracks, and beds. What they want there mystifies me, but if they wish to escape the presence of the introduced wildlife and their neighings, braying, and bellowings, this is the place.

On the morning of June 8, having eaten most of my food and drunk five of the ten gallons of water in Harvey's truck, I started for Los Angeles. Where the road crossed a Redwall hill two and a half miles south of the Meriwitica Trailhead I stopped to photograph the hill and its typical vegetation of gnarled cliff rose and agave. Fifty feet from the road I flushed a black throated (Desert) Sparrow from a small clump of rabbit brush (?), and found a nest, just above the ground, containing one small young sparrow and an infertile egg.

Before leaving the car, I had found a letter to Harvey from Jorgen Visbak from which I got the names of Homer Morgan and Bill Mooz (or Moose) and some information about the plans of the river party, including the fact that a Mrs. Elinor Lamb from Las Vegas was to have met them June 6 and taken Harrington and Mooz out June 7. I told the sheriff about this as I passed through Kingman. He called the Las Vegas Sheriff to check on an Elinor Lamb who was known to the latter sheriff, but found she was an operator of a western clothing store who was not known to go boating, as far as could be found at the time. He also tried to get through by radio to Temple Bar, but had received no reply by about 4:00 p.m. when I left. I arranged to be notified if they had to resume the search, but Harvey reached his car before the deadline, all unaware of the furor. I decided that Ervin's agitation had probably been conditioned by the fact that the last man he had left alone in that area was never seen again. The effects of remote events can echo even through time in curious ways; because of a 1931 river tragedy, I now have a speaking acquaintance with the sheriff of Mohave County!

Ervin climb area revisited
[July 3, 1966 to July 4, 1966]

Since I had brought back so little in the way of pictures from my visit on June 5th, I felt that I should go back and take more relevant shots. At the car after the climb up Mount Humphrey on Saturday, I was asked some questions by a man who proposed going up and spending the night on top. Since he had several days to do anything he wanted, I invited him to be my companion on the Sunday and Monday trip down Bridge Canyon and around to the east. He thought this over for a short time and agreed. I had suggested that the amount of water to be carried should be two quarts but when he showed up Sunday morning he had only one. He was sure that this would be plenty for himself and his two little dogs since I had said that we could get from one water source to another in four hours. Since he was quite experienced in the Sierras and had also done a fair amount of desert hiking, I didn't challenge this claim.

We drove my car to the rim of Hindu Canyon and started down on schedule at 9:00 a.m. One of the two little dogs kept right up to us at all times, but the 10 pound black dog was showing symptoms of difficulty in the heat within an hour. She wanted to hang back in any kind of shade. Art had to carry her numerous times, but still we seemed to be making better time than Ervin and I had done. It was only about a quarter of a mile from the ravine where I left the road to where the road turned north to go to the Bridge Canyon Trail and beyond to the viewpoint. I was satisfied that it is no longer safe to take any vehicle other than a four wheel drive beyond the place where I had parked.

A short distance after the road turns to climb out of Hindu, there is a corral and some lumber from a ruined shack. Farther on the road splits. We could tell that the long continuation goes to the west, but I thought that the other branch might go to the beginning of a clear trail up to the head of Bridge Canyon. At the end of this branch there is a shed still standing and for a portion of the way up the ravine beyond, we could follow a trail. Most of the way to the pass we were walking up as we saw fit, but it was the right pass. Williams still had to watch the little black dog to get her away from shade, but we were down at the spring in two and one half hours from the car. As I filled my canteen, I was a little afraid of the wasps, but they didn't sting. The dogs enjoyed getting the cool water our of Art's canteen on their backs.

I had suggested that since Art could see that his one quart had to be supplemented from my two quarts, he might consider staying at the spring while I continued to get the pictures. He was properly impressed by what he had seen of the canyon country and wanted to go on with me. When we had proceeded for about 15 minutes down a clear part of the trail, the little black dog gave unmistakable indications that he was suffering from the heat. This convinced him that he should go to the spring and wait for my return on Monday. I assured him that I would be back before noon and most likely before 9:00 a.m. Before we parted, I should have made sure he knew where this spring was. It never occurred to me that an outdoorsman like him would get confused with the spring only a half a mile away. I had pointed it out as we came down the switchbacks and it would have seemed insulting if I had made him review its location. When I got back at 8:00 a.m. Monday, I learned that he had spent a good part of the afternoon looking for the spring. He apparently had no idea where it might be in the whole upper end of the valley. He remembered that there is an old barb wire fence a hundred yards or so above the spring, but he couldn't find the fence. Finally, after spending as much time resting as walking, he came to the water. It was a good thing for me that he had agreed to go back because my two quarts were about right for my own needs in going over to the spring that Ervin had found, a trip of three and one half hours in the heat. I had to stop for three rest periods. My route was essentially the same as it had been four weeks ago, along the flat to the west of the wash for a short distance and then along the burro trail to the east until I came to a clearly man made portion nearer the ravine. On the return I avoided some of the distance involved in contouring on the burro trail by taking a good chance to drop down to the bed of the wash. At the bottom I saw who had improved the trail. An old sign is still standing. The board is just weather blackened wood, but when I went close, I could make out letters spelling Upper Dam Site. They now show only because the rest of the wood is sand blasted leaving them in slight relief. I suppose the original paint protected the part which is still legible. It seemed to take just about as long to walk the bed of the wash through soft gravel and the boulders as it had to walk the contour path above.

The walk along the rim from Bridge Canyon to 234 Mile Canyon seemed longer this time than it had four weeks ago. Possibly this was because I may have followed the burros out along the lower rim instead of taking the higher man made trail as I had before. I believe I also went farther south to cross 234 Mile Canyon than I had on the first occasion. Likewise, on the present trip, Ervin's route up the Redwall looked less promising than it had earlier. I had considered trying to climb it or see how high I could get, but when the rocks got so hot in the sun that I could just stand to touch them, I soon changed my mind. Rather than take time here, I walked on north to the river to get a view of the boat landing and the climb out of the inner gorge. The water was lower than it had been a month ago and I was a bit unsure of the identity of Ervin's projecting rock. The one I decided must be right was more nearly cubical than projecting out like a pier. I figured that Ervin must have walked out south about a quarter mile from the main rim of 234 Mile Rapid, which seemed to be kicking up higher waves than 234 Mile Rapid itself. I returned to my pack at the spring by 5:45 p.m. and ate my dinner after a cooling soak in the shallow water at the brink of the fall. After eating and drinking all the water I could take, I packed up and spent 45 minutes crossing 232 Mile canyon to spend the night on the other side. There was water in pools in the Archean bed of 234 Mile Canyon even above the place where the water from the spring goes down. There were also numerous burros down there and at least one or two were noisier and more aggressive than any I have ever seen. I could look down and see two or three scrapping for the attention of what I took to be a female. There was no classic fight with two stallions baring their teeth facing each other, but I saw one rearing and driving another away with its front hoofs. The braying was mixed with sounds more like shrieks and whistles than I had never heard before from a burro.

My cotton blanket was just right for a comfortable night, but I was bothered by a few mosquitoes. I packed up and started on as soon as it was light enough to see the trail and when I was approaching Bridge Canyon, I detoured down and back to eat breakfast along the rim with a fine view of the river showing 234 Mile Rapid. I reached Art Williams and his dogs at the spring just as he was finishing breakfast about 7:45 a.m. We took about an hour to reach the pass at the head of the trail, and this time we went up to the west and saw the road as it continues up a valley on its way out to the viewpoint overlooking Separation Canyon. We had to carry the black dog in a knapsack for most of the way up Hindu Canyon and out to the car which we reached in three and three quarters hours after leaving the spring.

One observation concerns the canyon from the north rim that reaches the river opposite Gneiss Canyon. From what I could make out, it might not be hard to climb the Redwall at its upper end. If this is so, it would offer a quicker route to the plateau than would Separation Canyon. However, it is hard to land at its mouth and I am not proposing that it is the true Separation Canyon. (Jorgen and I checked and the Redwall is impossible in this canyon.

Fossil Bay and Redwall rim to Specter
[July 25, 1966 to July 27, 1966]

For several years I had been interested in the possibility of getting from the top of Great Thumb Mesa to the Colorado River. Reilly had first suggested getting through the Redwall in Specter but had later reversed his opinion that it is possible. I had seen this from a plane a couple of times, and especially after the flight last September had believed that one could go to the rim of the Redwall southwest of Stanton Point and then along the Redwall rim around to Specter and down. In 1961 I had taken several trips to the Esplanade in Fossil Bay after locating the break in the rim a half mile southwest of the head of the main draw.

Just once I drove my 55 Ford up the access road north of the Topocoba Hilltop Road and I had had a $70 repair bill on the front end. I now left it at the fork where W2A turns north. On previous occasions I was able to walk from there to the break in the rim in four hours and I had even come back south from the same place once in three and one half hours when I thought that a winter storm was about to break. I found that I was slower now and that the interval had dimmed my recollection of the landmarks. I wasted several minutes in going out for a view north along the rim and I thought that I should have reached the place before I had. Just before you reach the place, there is a surveyor's crossbar mounted in a dead juniper at the high point of a ridge several hundred yards west of the rim. Another good landmark is the first steep valley draining to the west and leaving only a narrow ridge which formed the rim above Fossil Bay. Also, the cairn I built is still just east of the trace of a road. I am not surprised that Davis thought the north half of the route to the rim above 140 Mile Canyon not even Jeepable. The old route is overgrown and much less clear than it was five years ago. The horse trail through the junipers and old burn is much easier to follow, but even it doesn't seem as clear as it did when Allyn and I first came this way in 1957.

When I left the rim I tried something that I hadn't done since the very first time I went down. I descended rather near the break in the rim to the steep clay slope at the top of the Toroweap outcrop and tried to go horizontally to the north. This was very slow and precarious. On the way back I saw why I had previously given up this route. One should stay high until it is obvious that he has to descend. Down in the clay here there is a fair trail past one bump to the break in the Toroweap which leads to the talus covering the Coconino.

When you get down to where the slope gentles out in the black brush cover, you have to cross two ravines to the left to reach the deep rainpool area. I was gratified that I had drawn a bead on this three and one half foot deep slot in the bedrock which I feel holds water the year around. The recent rains that had broken the drought at Flagstaff seemed not to have done much for this western part of the park. The pothole water was a foot below the overflow point. I found everything as I had remembered it including the little fireplace I had built, but something that was new was the large tin box which had been airdropped to Fletcher in 1963. He had placed it under an overhang in a good slot. I tried opening it with the handle of my spoon, but the lid was rusted tight. It would take a strong screwdriver to pry it open. One thing that has not impressed me forcibly before was the prevalence of mosquitoes. At this time of the year they were bad, especially the second night.

My plan called for the second day of my projected five day trip to be a big one, settling the major question of whether one can walk down the shale in Specter. I was up before five and was on the trail by 5:40 a.m., carrying two gallons of water and food for three days. My timetable called for getting to the point along the Esplanade where I could go down to the Redwall in two hours. It was cold so early, but still I didn't keep up to schedule and I also bungled by overshooting the point close to the rim. It took 40 minutes walking back after I got oriented by looking down at the river and the bed of Fossil Creek. Getting down to the rim of the Redwall went off better than I had planned, in 50 minutes instead of an hour.

I took some time for a few pictures that might give more light on the possibility that Indians had been able to descend to the bed of Fossil in the semicircular bay opposite the route I had used through the Supai. My conclusion is the same as it was several years ago. As long ago as 800 years, the talus material probably came up to the rim and extended clear to the bottom at a steep but climbable angle. Now there is a break at the top which would require a rope, and the lower slopes of the talus are steepened so that no one could go on down even after using a rope to reach the cone of detritus. I was also able to study the broken rough places in the Redwall a half mile south of the mouth of Fossil. When I passed quickly in the plane, I had thought that the route here should be a real possibility, but my present one sided view made the route look like the chance for success should be more than 10% (it goes, Enfilade Point Route). It would still be worth a try. I also saw where I had come through the Supai on the other side of Fossil Creek. From further study from the Kaibab rim on the return on Wednesday, I saw what I consider to be a much more direct route from the Esplanade down to the possible route through the Redwall south of Fossil Creek.

My original timetable called for three and one half hours spent along the Redwall from Fossil to Specter. I was already about an hour behind schedule, and I seemed to be making poorer progress than I had hoped along here too. I decided to keep going forward until 2:00 p.m. If by then I saw that the rest of the trip down into Specter was sure, I would advance, but if not I would spend the rest of the afternoon heading back, a discouraging thought. It now seemed that this frustrating safety measure would have to be used. Perhaps I was trying to hurry, or it may be that I am getting careless. Anyway, while I was looking for the route two steps ahead, I stumbled. I tried to check the fall by advancing a foot, but that foot caught on something. I fell headlong and my canteen flopped up and caught my full weight on its shallow cylindrical surface. The 25 pound pack added to the impact. The blow came right over the heart. I got my canteen and pack off and rolled back into the shade of a large rock to get over the shock and assess the damage if any. I had cracked a rib in Kanab Creek with a lighter blow, and I had done the same with a heavier impact while skiing. I could move into various positions without too severe pain, and I decided that what I felt was probably just a severe bruise. I went on very carefully and slowly around the angle and down parallel to the river to the next point before the wall developed a hollow. It was probably about a sixth of the way to the ravine in Specter, and it had taken nearly an hour. The pain in my chest was increasing, and by now a sort of secondary shock was making my knees tremble. I took a couple of pictures and decided that I had had enough for one trip.

I noticed one thing before I started back. The slopes on the other side of the Colorado down near the water and up along the shale benches had the clearest system of animal trails that I have seen anywhere. They looked like burro trails but I didn't know that there ever were lots of burros in the area. I recall the somewhat mysterious information in the Escape Routes pamphlet that there is a trail upstream from the mouth of Tapeats Creek for 16 miles. I wonder whether this information came from aerial observation of these game trails.

Before starting up the Supai, I dumped almost a gallon of water. The evening and night at the pothole were marred by too many mosquitoes. I also came away from this trip with itching welts on the undersides of both forearms although I hadn't noticed any hoptrees. I also picked a tick off while I was eating a snack along the road back to the car.

There seems to be a way down to the Esplanade from the top of Powell Plateau on the west side about a half mile north of Wheeler Point.

After the poor sleep because of the mosquitoes and the discomfort of not being able to take a deep breath, I needed more than the usual four hours to reach the car after taking two hours from the camp to the plateau.

(Later, Gary Stiles helped me up through the Redwall in Fossil. Others have gone up through the Supai near the main bed. Others found that one can get down the Redwall at the head of Fossil and pass the chockstones and a chute to reach the river in Fossil Canyon.)

Tapeats, Deer Creek, and Galloway Canyons
[August 23, 1966 to August 26, 1966]

My previous approach to Specter had failed because I wasn't sure where I could get water. When I carried enough to get me back to the Esplanade in Fossil, I found walking very slow along the rim of the Redwall and got discouraged, especially after a fall that broke a rib. This next attempt would solve the water problem by staying where I could reach the river.

I drove up to Big Saddle Monday evening. In the morning I used the road that goes out to Crazy Jug Point as I had in 1957. The road was much better now and I found that several new branches were a bit confusing. I reached the rim and took the one along the rim to the west. About three miles from where I had slept by the gate across the Crazy Jug Point Road, this road starts downhill into a valley that separates Monument Point from the main plateau. I parked here and went on foot below the Kaibab Limestone and followed a poor deer trail around below Monument Point as I had done in November, 1957, when Don Finicum and Allyn Cureton had stayed above and had come down to meet me near the end of the point. We had walked a dead heat at that time, but I am now convinced that they had an easier time by staying on top as long as possible. Then as we had done in 1957, I went northwest past the point until I came to the talus that covers the Coconino and all but the top few feet of the Toroweap. Below here I found an intermittent trail that led down to the main Thunder River Trail from Little Saddle. By the route I used this time, it took me one and one half hours from the car to the horse trail or Forest Service Trail 123. This is very likely an hour less than it would have taken me to come in from the end of the road at Little Saddle, but I could have done it in at least fifteen minutes less if I had stayed on the plateau across Monument Point and had headed for the small bay in the rim northwest of the place to get through the Toroweap and Coconino. I came up to the plateau here with Norvel Johnson last year and I came out the same way at the end of the trip this year. A deer trail goes down the draw into this bay and then splits. One branch follows a ledge on the cliff which forms the south side of the bay and the other gets down to the northwest and then turns left to the break in the Coconino. Norvel and I used this latter last year, but I got up this time by the former. There is a place where one has to crawl under a overhang to stay on the ledge. I had to put my canteen in the pack and move it along in front of me by one hand while I crawled 15 feet.

While I was walking along under Monument Point, I had a good view of Powell Plateau and I believe I saw where one can get from the rim down to the Esplanade somewhere to the northeast of Newberry Point. With no map along (an unusual oversight), I didn't locate it well. I don't know whether I'll ever be able to set foot in this rather forbidding region, the largest section left on my map with no trail marks.

I also took a good look at a possible route to get down from the north side of Great Thumb Point to the Esplanade. From my distant viewpoint, it looked safe.

The main trail along the Esplanade to Thunder Spring is now fairly well marked with cairns, but there don't seem to be as many signs of use by horse parties as when I first came this way in 1951. I could see footprints of several people in the sand and dust, but they had already come out. This was my fifth trip down here, but it was the first that was solo. The walking is surprisingly level and the rocks are of fantastic shapes. Many times during these four days I thought that the views were superior to any we had seen on the recent vacation trip through South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. I didn't try to hurry, but my total time from the car to Tapeats Creek was four hours, my fastest yet. I believe I could save a quarter of an hour yet by keeping to the top plateau to reach the bay on the west side of Monument Point before starting down.

The creek was not high and after lunch I crossed and proceeded down the trail on the left side. I now had to decide how I would proceed towards Specter Chasm. I felt sure that I could climb up from the river on the south side opposite the mouth of Tapeats, but I had no clear recollection as to the possibilities farther upstream. I figured that I would cross below Tapeats Rapid and then follow the higher levels upriver until I came to water in the bedrock of a side canyon or found a way to climb down and camp by the river. I crossed back over to the right bank of Tapeats Creek a bit too soon and rather than wet my feet again, spent extra time going along the precarious slope above a cliffy promontory. I think I could have seen an Indian ruin on this promontory if I had looked as well for such things as I did when I was returning along the other side on Friday. I reached the river in about one and three quarter hours from the camp sites at the foot of the trail. After a little rest in the hottest part of the day, I walked down to the foot of the rapid and crossed on my mattress.

It was easy to follow the river back upstream for quite a distance, but I made the mistake of climbing up above the cliffs just upstream from the mouth of Tapeats,. This climb was exhausting in the heat, loose material underfoot, and the walking along the side hill contour wasn't much better. I couldn't see from where I walked whether I could get back to the river for water, and there was none on a couple of places showing bedrock. I began to worry about getting shut away from the river with no water for the night. When I came to the first real tributary on the south side of the river, about a half mile upstream from the mouth of Tapeats, I could see a couple of shallow rainpools way down below me in the narrow bed, but the prospect of the long walk uphill to find a way down to them seemed like the last straw. If I had been fresh from a start at the mouth of Tapeats, my decision might have been quite different, but now I turned back and found a way to the beach rather near where I gave up. I floated downriver and across but didn't take a chance of getting caught by the current and taken into Tapeats Rapid. I left the water upriver from the mouth of the creek and walked past the last cliff. Upon further study, I decided that this was needless caution, but when I am alone I try to err on the side of safety. I enjoyed one of my best nights ever on the sand first with nothing on and then with only a cotton blanket. For a bit on Wednesday I couldn't decide how to plan the rest of my trip. If I went right over to Stone, I couldn't do Galloway justice and get back to camp at Stone the same day, or so I thought, so I aimed at another target of opportunity that I had considered previously, but not for this trip to Deer Creek and back along the river. Booth, Morgan, and Harrington had done it the hard way, up the wrong ledge and over into Bonito Creek. They had made it to the river by using their rope. By now I had given up the idea of getting to Specter and back, so I started for Deer Creek. Walking the riverbank was routine until I came to the mouth of Bonita where a diabase promontory made it necessary to climb up the slope. It was just a bit difficult to find a place to climb down into the bed of Bonita, but there are two. Bonita Rapid was not as long as Tapeats, but the waves were bigger. The next impassive part of the river was a couple of hundred yards before the beginning of Granite Narrows. A big boulder bar extends from the right and directs the current against a low ledge sticking out from the left side. The water piles up against the ledge and forms a big swirl on the upriver side. Some water at this stage flows behind a dark rock island near the left bank. I would surely not want to run through on an air mattress, but there was plenty of beach to walk on the right. The water appeared perfectly smooth in the narrows.

It would be interesting to know what the other party did here. I first followed up the ramp formed by the lowest ledge. About ten minutes walk up here I could see that the ledge ended completely, but before I reached this place, I found several Indian ruins. There was even a mano on a metate here, and to prove I was not the discoverer, there was a piece of galvanized wire holding a plastic ribbon. After retracting to the beginning of the narrows, I avoided the next ramp up and climbed to the spacious slope still higher. On the return, I found that the second ramp connects with this slope and makes it unnecessary to go as high as I did. Walking was easy to the saddle where I went up and down into Deer Creek Valley. On the descent I came on a couple of ruins and then remembered that Euler had told me they were here. I reached the creek in just less than three hours after leaving the mouth of Tapeats and I returned in about 15 minutes less time although I made the mistake of staying too high too long after going up at the mouth of Bonita. At the beginning of Granite Narrows, I saw driftwood higher above the water than just about anywhere else along the Colorado River. It was hard for me to believe that the water had ever been this high, about 60 feet above the present level.

After a two hour break, I started for Stone Creek. I had looked over the climbing route up above the mouth of Tapeats to the east, but I dismissed it as too tough for me with my pack. Another bit of climbing that I flunked was to follow the ledge above the last gorge at Deer Creek on the left where Morgan, Booth, and Harrington had come last year. Although I had only my canteen at the time, I decided that those three are better rock climbers or are greater fools than I, probably some combination of those two categories. Now on the way to Stone, I labored back up the talus on the usual trail to Thunder Spring from the river until I could cross above the final gorge. This detour isn't really too long. I had remembered a clearer deer trail along the bluff from the mouth of Tapeats to the mouth of Stone than I found this time. Perhaps when we went along there in early June the deer had been using it recently, but now in late August they had been on the plateau above for a long time. Actual deer tracks in this low area were few and old looking. Before stopping for the evening, I moved upstream and camped near the slope where the trail starts climbing away from the creek to the east. The night was surprisingly cool and after getting under my blanket early, I found myself putting on some long johns and my regular clothes before the night was over.

The next morning I was up with the first light and was heading away from camp about 6:40 a.m. with almost one and one half gallons of water and my lunch. I had just left the creekbed and was walking at the edge of a patch of cane when I had my closest encounter with a rattler. My eyes were a few feet ahead of my feet when I heard the buzz and saw that my forward foot was about six inches from the head of the four and one half foot snake. It was not coiled and had only enough slack in the neck to strike about four inches, but I wasted no time in withdrawing. This shook me quite a bit since I thought how serious it would be to go through with even a non fatal bite so far from help.

The trail up to the ridge separating Stone from Galloway was about the clearest and easier to follow of this area. One can see human planning behind it with deer use for maintenance. With the various ruins in Stone, this is easy to believe. For a clincher, I found pot sherds at the edge of a red rock ramp about 100 feet above the bed of Galloway just south of the Tapeats narrows. Something contrary to Euler's report obtained when he flew over Galloway by chopper was the presence of a small amount of running water about a half mile down the bed to the west from where the old trail entered the bed. I didn't need it, but I could see the sky reflected in the small pools and there was water obviously running over two three foot ledges.

The narrows through the Tapeats could have been avoided by keeping to the higher level, but side sill walking is always slower unless the bed is impossible. For a few moments, I thought I was licked as I went up into the narrows. A chockstone blocked the way where the rather smooth walls were just too far apart for chimney climbing. However, after putting my canteen and pack with the lunch up behind the chockstone, I was able to wriggle up too on the third attempt. There were two other places where I had to use my hands, but they were easy compared to the first spot.

About where the two upper arms came together, I got a view of the upper part of the north branch and saw why Reilly had thought it a walk up from his aerial view. However, when I had climbed up the rather sharply rising bed to the upper three fourths of the Redwall, I found an 80 foot cliff barring the way. I studied this climb for a break to the south, but I decided that this would be for the experts with hardware. Another flaw with its being an old Indian route to the rim is that the Supai seems to offer no route at all near. It would be clearly easier for a man to walk back from Stone to Tapeats and then out. With the present trail system, I am sure that I could do this in a long day. After returning from Galloway, I camped in Tapeats and reached the car the next day.

A few more comments might be in order. There is a feasible route for climbing from the left bank of the Colorado River below Deubendorf Rapids. If one went up 800 or 900 feet he could find a fairly level bench on which to walk to Specter. I had about dismissed this route as a ridiculously hard way to go from a car to Specter, but I have now changed my mind. It would be less than an eight hour walk from where I parked to the mouth of Stone using the best way off the rim. From the mouth of Tapeats to the mouth of Stone shouldn't take more than two hours. I could even camp on the left bank across from Stone the first day and be able to walk to Specter or past if necessary to reach water. To check out the route up Specter and the other route I have been thinking of upstream from the mouth of Fossil would take another day, so one would have to devote five days to the effort. Five or six days together would be enough if one were to start down the Bass Trail. If one were sure he could make it along the Redwall rim from Fossil to Specter and then down Specter to water, this would be the fastest, especially if he had a four wheel drive and could camp with water at the rim above Fossil Bay. If he had to start where I leave my car on the Topocoba Road, parts of four days would be necessary, or five if one wanted to check the place south of Fossil. All in all, I rather favor going back and trying it again with the Tapeats Stone route.

I had a rough night sleeping where I did in Tapeats after ten and one half hours of actual walking on Thursday. I found a good level place where there were no obvious ant hills, and yet in the night I was overrun with tiny red ants. I had thought that ants don't work at night, but I was bitten two or three times and they crawled over me until I was finally cool enough to get under the blanket. They were into my food in such numbers that I got most of my bites in the morning when I was trying to shake them off my gear. What I saw too late was a neat sandy ledge under an overhang right beside the creek where the rushing water kept it locally cool all day and night.

Even on short sleep rations, I was able to enjoy the walk to the car as much as any I have ever had. First I relocated three ruins in Tapeats Valley. Cairns and diggings show that many have seen them too, but I had missed them on all but one of my previous trips, and then I had seen only the most obvious. In Surprise Valley, I cut across instead of following the trail down and around the two great lumps of limestone that have slipped from the north wall. About the middle of this cutoff, I found a large mescal pit. I also noted where the trail along the Esplanade cuts right through two more mescal pits. There was a haze in the air which brought out the various headlands in the direction of Supai and beyond. I have never seen the Esplanade appearing to greater advantage.

Upper Crystal Creek
[September 24, 1966]

My plan was to get an early start by sleeping near the takeoff point and go down into Crystal, out to the river along the Tonto, and come back up to the rim out of Tuna where I had done it last year about the same time. I had studied my two slides of the possible route down into Flint Creek, one taken from the air but not at the best place, and the other taken from the rim of Galahad Point mostly to show Gawain Abyss. The more I studied them, the less likely it seemed that there is a ropeless descent of the Redwall about two miles north of the Tuna Flint Saddle ( I have done this without a pack). The aerial view looked promising if a ramp extended around a corner and continued up but the view from Galahad showed no continuation. In order not to lead one or two students on a frustrating trip or perhaps tempt them to attempt a dangerous rock climb, I switched the goal to filling in the route from Crystal around into Tuna.

At the last minute, Norvel Johnson had to count himself out but a new student, Chuck Johnson, came along. He had gone up Sunset faster than I could and he had taken a long solo tour of the attractions of Utah last summer, so I figured that he had the necessary strength and ambition. We left home at 3:30 a.m., ate at 6:00 at Cliff Dwellers, and after another stop at Jacob's Lake reached Point Sublime by 9:30 p.m. There must have been quite a rain that day. Water was in big puddles over the road, and at one place we had to swing a dead tree off the road to get past. After a couple of hours on the ground, we moved into the car a little after midnight when there was a brief shower. I finished the night with about two more hours of sleep in the car.

We waited until it was light enough for me to show Chuck the proposed route along the Tonto on the east side of Tuna and he had time to take in the early morning view. We drove back to the fire road that cuts across the Basin to Park Headquarters and parked about a half mile from the junction. It was much cooler back in the woods then it had been on Point Sublime. We passed the place where I had left the rim last year. A little farther on we came close to the rim again and got a look at the lay of the land. The place where I had come out last year was still ahead. After skirting the first little valley, we went down between the first towers of Kaibab Limestone. The deer trail we found led us east and then we went down mostly using deer trails just west of the spire that I passed to the east last fall. We got into some bad brush and thorns at times, but we made fair time and found no problems in passing through the Supai. It was easy to reach the end of the valley on the Redwall rim that is about two thirds or a mile south of the 15' parallel on the East half map. We knew that we should turn south along the rim to try the descent. I had thought, from a distant view, that the route might be down the end of the promontory just east of the next ravine, but after looking the place over, we saw that it would be much easier to go down the bed of the ravine. There was no difficulty here. Quite a fault passes through this ravine with the Redwall to the east a good many feet higher than that to the west. I am a little surprised that Maxon's map of the Bright Angel Quad doesn't hint at this.

At the bottom of this scramble down the Redwall, I suddenly became aware that my left foot was giving me fits. There were pains all through it, but it seemed more like a fallen arch than a sprained ankle. I taped the instep well and it seemed to be getting along fairly well until we stopped for lunch two hours later. When I tried to walk on it again, the pain was intense until I had used it a while. We had reached by noon a place about three fourths of a mile north of the junction of Crystal and the arm that comes south from the end of the Dragon. I had been weakened by the pain in my foot and I could see that my project to go out to the river and turn up into Tuna that night was out. It seems to me now that even when able bodied, I should expect to take two and one half days for that whole traverse.

The permanent flow in Crystal starts in a grove of giant cottonwoods about east of the name Grama Point on the old east half map. A tiny flow of muddy water coming down spoiled the clear water.

Aerials Shiva, Osiris, Ra, Flint, and Specter
[October 20, 1966]

Bill Martin was happy to pilot me on another scouting expedition. I had resolved to shoot only at preselected spots, but broke this resolution by potting away at Crater Lake, northwest of Kendrick Park and also at Red Mountain. At my request we stayed about even with the base of the Coconino Sandstone most of the time that we were over the Canyon. I believe that distance above the Redwall and out from the Supai is better on the whole.

We flew into Phantom Creek enough east to let me get a shot of the possible Redwall passage west of Sturdevant Point. Then I switched to the other side of the two seater Cessna 182 for a shot down to the place Clubb climbed the Redwall on the north side of the east promontory from the base of Isis. I will believe his word that they climbed here, but I will say that I would never have considered it as a way to the top of the cliff (expert climbers say this is impossible). I wonder whether they even saw my route at the west end of the valley.

Next we passed over the Shiva Isis Saddle and I got a look at the Supai south of the saddle. A first impression would make one think it much easier than where the Clubbs came up the Redwall, but I didn't really pick a route. As we sailed past the south side of Shiva, I confirmed several men's opinion that deer could walk up the Coconino along the southwest shoulder and probably go on to the top after proceeding east along the base of the Kaibab Limestone.

Having the entire back to myself let me slide over to look down on Davis' route up the final Supai cliff of Osiris. I could see blocks that would have to be surmounted and I didn't have time to spot any chimney. I would agree that he made a remarkable ascent. Around the curve of the cliff to the east where he suggested I check before giving up, I spotted a much more likely way up. There seemed to be a pattern of blocks with fissures behind them which seemed inviting to me. I definitely would like to try this one some time.

The place I had concluded S H K went up from the Tonto to the rim of the Redwall on the north side of the promontory thrusting north from Ra looked even better from the air than it had from below. My impression from the air was that it seemed easier than the route down just north and east of the Ra Osiris Saddle. Of course an attempt at climbing might cause me to revise this estimate. I couldn't feel sure that I had spotted the narrow wall connecting an offshoot with the main rim, but I saw a suggestion of this feature.

After doubling back for more pictures of the crucial climb area, we went on south around Confucius and Mencius and up the west arm of Tuna over the Tuna Flint Saddle. There are definitely two distinct ways to get through the Coconino west of Point Sublime, but the one I have used is the one farther south, rather near the end of the ridge.

Before we reached the saddle, I noted something that substantiates Clubb's report that Lawes and MacRae went off Grama Point when they led the parachutists up to the road. There may be a route through the Redwall down from the ridge going to Confucius into Tuna. I believe I saw it southwest of the word Creek in the name Tuna Creek on the east half map. At least I feel that this spot is worth checking (not a Redwall break, ravine on west side).

My impression of the route northwest from the Tuna Flint Saddle is that one can get down the Supai about anywhere and that it would be easier walking along at the level of the saddle until one is nearing the hoped for break in the Redwall. I looked hard at the broken area without being able to make up my mind. In the first pass, I almost concluded that it is hopeless without some rope. We climbed clear around most of Sagittarius Ridge to come back and let me look again. On the way back from Specter, Bill took me over the area once more and this time I became almost sure that I can walk down into Flint.

I had been thinking of getting Bill to fly me over Powell Saddle and give me a look into upper Crazy Jug Canyon, but I decided that I will be along there during Thanksgiving and that I might not prove anything from the air anyway. We headed over the Esplanade south of Wheeler Point. I watched for a way to get down from the rim on the west side of Powell Plateau and I took a picture of a dubious place west of Newberry Point. I am afraid I didn't make the best use of the time on this trip. I didn't feel quite as alert as I had last year. From our altitude, I got just a glimpse of the top of Thunder Fall, fragmentary but still a thrill. I could have looked directly below at Bedrock Canyon, but I remember Stone and Galloway better as we wheeled to pass over Specter. We were higher this year and I got a better look at the top of the Redwall ravine. I don't believe the difficulty at the top is a chockstone, but I couldn't be sure what it is like even though we circled and passed it again. There may be a short vertical drop in the wall to a plunge pool before the bed becomes easy to follow on down. I must study it from the ground. Next we flew the plane south of the mouth of Fossil where I suspect a Redwall descent is possible. I feel that the probability of success here is greater than in Flint or Specter. I saw how to connect the picture I took last year. The ravine through the lower part is south of where I figured one should come off the rim. The sure approach would be to come down the Bass Trail and over here with plenty of places to camp by water, but this would take five good hiking days all together.

There was so much to see that I am afraid I went into a sort of daze as soon as I had taken the last picture. Still I felt that the trip had been most worth while. The high points were the easier route up Osiris, the Stanton, Hislop, and Kane ascent area, the Flint Creek Redwall descent, Specter, and the Redwall break south of Fossil. They all make me hopeful that I will have the time and health to take them on.

Old Hance Trail and Tse An Bide
[November 5, 1966]

A year or more ago, I had reviewed the location of the head of the Old Trail in connection with the new parking viewpoint. Reaching the trailhead is far easier than it used to be before the new rim road was built. There is a paved picnic area on the east slope of the hill about four and one half miles east of Grandview Point and between one quarter and one half mile east of this is a viewpoint parking at the south end of a bay. It is just east of a fault that has left quite a tower in the rim a bit west of the parking. There are several forested ravines cutting into the rim along here, and the Old Trail is in the one farthest to the east. The rim is higher and unbroken from here around to the head of the New Hance Trail.

One thing was different. When one has gone down from the road along the slope for 50 yards or so, one comes to a sign announcing that he was on the Old Hance Trail, that it was not maintained and that permission was needed before a trip. We could follow some trail construction indicating switchbacks for 200 yards farther, but beyond that we just walked down the rockslide. That rolling rocks are quite numerous is shown by the fact that the relatively new park sign giving the name of the trail has already been hit by quite a rock which broke the lower edge of the heavy board. Near the top of the Coconino it seems expedient to get out of the ravine you have been in and move to one farther west. It comes back and joins the first one near the lower edge of the Coconino. From past experience with this trail, I thought that one should cross several rather bare ravines to a juniper covered slope to the east. Norvel Johnson had gotten ahead of me at the very first. He chose the route I prefer to the bottom of the Coconino. When he went on down the main ravine, I spoke to him and to my other student companion, Chuck Johnson, about going over to the forested slope to the east. Without arguing the point, they simply proceeded down the ravine while I followed my judgment. They got far below me while I was making the traverse to the wooded slope, but when I came to the Redwall, I had to wait for them for about ten minutes. Even when they were within shouting distance, they continued to make poor decisions. I had to yell that they were headed for another impossible fall near the very bottom. We got together near the rock with a large cairn at the place where the trail drops off into the wash on the east side of the slope.

There is a bit of water polished Redwall in the bed of the ravine that seemed different this time. As I had remembered it, one could take a run and get to the top, just a few feet of smooth rock. Now it seemed to be too high for this. Perhaps a recent flood has deepened the approach. I thought that it was impossible the first time I came up this way and I had climbed the weathered limestone to the south to get past. To go up here, we had to use this system again.

A few yards to the north one comes to the place where you leave the bed and go either up through a notch or to the left around a bump of rock on the shelf. I had seen clear trail construction around to the left, but Dan Davis had built a cairn indicating that the best route was up and down to the trail on the other side. We took the liberty of destroying his cairn and building a bigger one at the right place. This is where I missed the trail on my second passage (my first trip down) and had followed the bed down to a dry fall where Jack Morrow and I had succeeded by finding a precarious bypass.

It took about 15 minutes to walk from here down the bed of the east arm of Hance Canyon to the point directly below the cave. The cave mouth was still hidden by the lower ledges when I announced that we should think about starting up. It had taken an even two hours to go from the car to this place, but this could be shortened by familiarity with the best route. Chuck and I put our canteens and other gear down before starting for the base of the cave. The lowest ledge is easily reached by going up a talus to the north. Then you follow this level to the south until you come to a ravine through the rock with many good holds. The best place is around a corner when you are coming from the north. This about the steepest and hardest part of the climb is where Bruce Faure turned back in 1957. Norvel and Chuck consistently showed their climbing skill and strength by choosing slightly harder places to go up then I did. You follow this higher ledge for several hundred yards until you are actually south of the cave mouth. There is very little more climbing to get into the cave. We found deer trail signs even up here, but I don't remember any in the cave itself. I was beginning to think that the deer may use this for shelter during storms. When Allyn and I were here in 1957, there were no human footprints noticeable, although Art Lange had been through it. This time we saw numerous human footprints. It is quite a cave, unusual for the large outer room with the abrupt tapering to a corridor 200 feet back. I knew from Donald Davis that the passageway leading to the top of the Redwall cliff goes slightly north at first and then turns south as it rises. I was carrying a candle for light, and when the cave corridor became really low and narrow, there was quite a draft. I had to protect the flame to keep the candle from blowing out. Most of the time one could walk upright and admire the decorated surface of the walls and ceiling. It is a dusty cave and the bosses of travertine are all covered with orange dust. There seem to be no stalactites, but the big bulges covered with littler snowball effects which are themselves pocked with tiny pimples are everywhere. Although we passed through the whole cave in 40 minutes, I managed to see something I had never witnessed before in my very limited exposure to caves, some gypsum flowers that diverged from one spot in the wall and spread out like narrow strips of bacon. They were thin and translucent and didn't seem to catch the dust that covered everything else.

At a few places we had to flatten out on our stomachs and wriggle under a low ceiling. Norvel found the way past some rocks that almost stopped us. We had to do a few contortions where it was hard to find something to brace against with your head sticking out a couple feet above one floor and your feet two or three feet above the other. However, we had the draft of air to tell us that this was the right route. There were a few side chambers, but I don't think there is any chance to get lost in this cave. The upward grade is quite uniform except at the very end when you are getting daylight again. Then you have to shinny up a steep pitch of flowstone.

Fortunately for me there are a couple of good spots for fingers to grip.

You walk out standing up in an archway that faces south in a deep niche below the rim of the cliff. There are a couple of ways to walk away and get up above the top rim of Redwall and it is an easy 25 minute walk from here back to the Old Trail where it comes down into the wash. A deer trail guided me down at the same place where Norvel, Barton French, and I had descended in 1965. One way to locate this upper entrance to Tse An Bide is that the one niche is near the south side of a sort of squarish sunken area. This break goes quite far back into the Supai. It is a little hard to identify Coronado Butte from below, but the upper entrance is definitely south of the towers of this butte.

I followed the Redwall rim south to the Old Trail and returned to pick up my pack in less time than it would have taken to go back through the cave and climb down to it. Norvel and Chuck went back through the cave to retrieve Norvel's canteen that he had left towards the lower end. Then Norvel came back up through the cave and went to the Old Trail along the Redwall rim while Chuck went on down to meet me at his pack. We had a late lunch together back where the Old Trail first starts down the Redwall. While I was finishing, Norvel poked around and found a way down into the wash to the west. Here he discovered quite a cache of tools and a hole in the limestone where some oldtimer had been prospecting. We walked up to the car from here in less than two hours.

Boucher, Slate, and Hermit Canyons
[November 11, 1966 to November 13, 1966]

Snow and rain a few days before the three day weekend made me change my plan from the north rim to the south, especially since I could do all the necessary driving on pavement.

After checking in at the Old Park Headquarters, Reider Peterson, Chuck Johnson, and I were ready to head down the Hermit Trail by 8:40 a.m. The day was rather gloomy but the weather got progressively better and Saturday and Sunday were as fine as a fall day ever is. The Boucher Trail doesn't deserve to be wiped off the map. We could stay on it more of the time then we could the Hance or Red Canyon Trail. Someone has gone along it fairly recently and placed quite a few cairns so that it is easier to find than it used to be. The other three times I had been along it, I had missed the trail just below where it starts down the Supai, but his time we looked ahead and saw that it keeps rather high, just below the top cliff, until it gets over into the main arm of Travertine Canyon. We kept on it almost all the way down to the Redwall, but near the bottom it swings to the east and I thought we should short cut. This was a mistake because we got into some rough going. The trail crosses the wash right at the rim.

We ate an early lunch where the trail starts down the Redwall into the east arm of Boucher. While I stayed by the packs and read Time magazine, the other two climbed White's Butte. When we subtracted this half hour from our overall elapsed time, we found that we had come from the car to Boucher Camp in exactly the same time (5 hours and 10 minutes) that I had used on my first trip down. We went down to see the rapid and by the time we were back from the river, it was 4:00 p.m. Now I wished that I had gone up Boucher to see the upper gorge and had let the others go to the river without me. I felt fairly sure that I wouldn't see all that was interesting in the available time, but I started up the bed anyway. Reider and Chuck elected to stick around camp.

Although I had told the others I would be back by 5:00 p.m., the canyon got so interesting as I approached the Redwall, that I told myself that they wouldn't worry if I were a few minutes late in getting back and I continued on until 4:45 (later R. Fletcher found the Redwall passage up Boucher and Bob Packard the route through the Supai) I had passed the main source of water at the upper end of the Tapeats narrows. There was more water flowing at the base of the Redwall. I was able to reach a place where the whole bed is an exposed horseshoe of gray limestone with a 15 foot drop with lots of small ledges that make the climb easy. I could see the Redwall gorge getting narrow ahead when I had to turn back. By running whenever the bed was smooth on the return, I got back in only 25 minutes. There was time enough to cook the soup by daylight. About the time that some of the stars were showing, we heard distant voices and could shout to the four Sierra Club hikers who had come from Phoenix to see the Boucher Trail. Soon we could see their flashlights, still well above the Tapeats Formation and not coming downhill very fast. Finally I borrowed Reider's flashlight and went up the trail to meet them. There was enough light for me to find the trail and follow it without using the light on the way up. I met the party just as they were ready to start down the Tapeats, but they were happy to be reassured that they were indeed on the trail. When we got down to the vicinity of the camp, my having seen the rough area by daylight really paid off.

The ground was still quite wet from the recent storm, and when I had been asleep an hour or two, I woke up with rather cold knees where they stuck off the short air mattress. I could have put my extra clothing under them on top of the plastic sheet, but I choose to pick up everything and move into the mine shaft. Finding it was a bit difficult with no light but the stars, but I kept to it rather directly and slept fine except that some sort of rat began making a lot of noise near my toes inside the shaft. I moved out on the platform at the entrance and the rat must have left. When I moved back in, there was no further noise.

Reider elected to go up Boucher Creek Saturday morning while Chuck and I were exploring lower Slate. We stayed rather close to the rim as we approached the mouth of Crystal. I noticed that there is a break in the Tapeats rim about a quarter of a mile east of the mouth, a short distance east of the point on which I stood while trying to duplicate Stanton's picture taken south across the river. The Stanton Party might have noticed this from below. The sure way to connect with this route through the Tapeats would be to start up the schist near the mouth of Crystal and go east along the base of the Tapeats. Perhaps Stanton, Hislop, and Kane did this since this break would have been more obvious from below than the place a short walk up from the mouth into Crystal Creek before starting up.

Another observation was that the supposed break in the Tapeats on the west side of Crystal near the mouth didn't seem as sure from across the river as it did from across Crystal. I can't count on getting up there until I have actually done it (others have used it and I did it in October, 1977).

After we turned into the route away from the river paralleling Slate, we had to walk back around one big bay. At the next cut into the rim, I suggested that we should look closer for a possible descent. Almost immediately we hit a trail that had a number of signs of being a man made trail, rocks rolled aside and regular switchbacks. It went down below the Tapeats and then worked upstream into Slate before going to the bottom. Near the end there was a place that would stop a mule but formerly there may have been some walls that held a trail possibly for stock. Beginning at the bottom of this trail and going halfway to the river, water was flowing on the surface. We conjectured that the trail was for the purpose of reaching the water. It was an easy walk down to the river. From my previous viewpoints, I had never seen a streambed going clear to the river, but there is one right to river level. The rapid starts well above this stream mouth and there is very little slack water at the mouth. If one were to try to stop at Slate, he would have to steer a boat between the wall and a rock with only a few inches of water going over it at the present stage. After an abrupt drop of about a foot, he would have to get into the quiet water that is about 20 yards long by 20 feet wide.

The whole rapid is broad with many rocks not very deeply submerged. There was one big rock wall above water towards the lower end south of the middle of the river. If Tadje, Clement, and Russell got their boat caught on one of the rocks in Crystal Rapid, it is hard to see how they could have made it to shore and still harder to see how they expected to get a rope to it to pull it off. If the rock was the one only 20 feet from the wall just above where the water goes slack for 20 yards, reaching shore would not be hard, but getting back to the boat against the current would be pretty hopeless. Maybe their mishap occurred much lower in the rapid.

When we went up the bed of Slate, we purposely passed by the place we had come down in order to test the place that I had seen on my picture from the other side of the river. The bed of Slate is remarkably straight, but it makes one prominent jog to the west. As you walk upstream and turn west, you face an impassable fall in a sort of dike of brown igneous rock which contrasts sharply with the shiny gray schist just to the west. We found it fairly easy to climb up south just east of this fall. The route could be negotiated by a deer or wild burro, and we could have gone down into the creek bed above the fall. It would be interesting to see whether one could get through the Tapeats straight upstream to the Tonto Trail. It was easy to walk on up to the Tapeats where we went out.

By two we were back at Boucher Camp and in 20 minutes we were on our way over to Hermit Camp along the Tonto. This was only my third trip across and I was impressed again with the ruggedness of some of the terrain close to Travertine Canyon. The trail goes out close to the rim and gives a fine view of Hermit Rapid. We camped on the east side of the creek below the south part of Hermit Camp where the Tonto Trail crosses. I slept under an overhang and was very warm, but we were all bothered by mice. On the way out on Sunday, Reider, Chuck, and I stopped our hike long enough to climb Lookout Point. I hadn't remembered what a sharp little point it has. Of course, there was a cairn on top.

My present thinking about Clement, Tadje, and Russell is that they lodged their boat on a rock at the lower end of Crystal Rapid rather close to the left bank and climbed up some distance west of the mouth of the Creek. They probably followed the bed of the stream until they came to the barrier fall. On the Tonto Trail, Russell went back and east to the Boucher Trail while the others went straight up Slate.

From west of Crazy Jug Point to south of Fire Point
[November 23, 1966 to November 25, 1966]

The original plan was to use five days and carry through four projects: (1) check the descent into Crazy Jug Canyon, (2) cover the route between Monument and Crazy Jug Points over to the place where I had been in Saddle Canyon, (3) climb Cogswell Butte, and (4) check a possible descent route to the river west of Deer Creek. Doug Shough and I accomplished the first two, but we both got a bit tired of the cold nights before we had done the last two. We saw that the fourth would be out of the question in the four days anyway.

Starting at 5:00 a.m., we were able to park at Big Saddle Camp by 9:30 even though we had to go the long way around because the cutoff from Jacob Lake to Ryan was closed by construction. We left the car at the deer camp rather than take it out on the rim road because we didn't know which way we would be returning. I led Doug off the rim a bit too soon, a mistake which was apparent when we had no direct route through the Coconino Formation. However, we could see a way to the west. When we reached it, we found the trail that I had been over in 1957. It was now marked with more cairns and even had some plastic ribbons tied to limbs as identification. We lost it on the lower slope, probably because it goes west toward Bridger's Knoll. After heading lower and somewhat to the east, we finally came on a clear trail along the lower part of the Esplanade. (A way to locate the trail from the rim is to remember that it is a short distance west of the only hogback between Bridger's Knoll and the knolls south of Crazy Jug Point.) Progress eastward along the trail was easy. At first it lay between the pinyon juniper forest and the bare rocks. Quite soon we saw several large rain pools on the flat rocks, and we quit worrying about the water supply. As a matter of fact, these were the first and the last of their kind we saw on the whole trip. As we rounded the outliers from Crazy Jug Point, the main trail went to the northeast, but a spur seemed to be leading southeast into the lower bed of the canyon. We were able to follow a draw down until there was only one good drop down to the talus that led to the Redwall rim. We were able to bypass this drop by turning to the north around a point and scrambling down with no serious obstacles. We could have gone on down to the bed here, but the bottom seemed quite a bit higher before it went into a slot through the Redwall east of the fault zone than it was where it emerged. We went farther south and got down into the bed with only one switch from the bed of a wash to a parallel fault ravine to the right. From here we could make easy progress down the bed, through two impressive narrows, for about 15 minutes, but here the cleft narrowed to a width of eight or ten feet then there was a sudden drop of 50 feet with sheer walls on both sides. A little above this final impasse we had walked under a ball shaped limestone block about ten feet in diameter that was jammed just above our heads. When we got back to the place we had reached the bed, we decided to continue up the bed and see what the narrows above would be like. I strongly suspected that we would be stopped by a fall, but although there were a couple of scrambles up beside big blocks, we soon came out into the upper stretch where one side was Supai talus. Above this we entered the uppermost narrows where the creek cuts through solid Redwall to the east, and here we were stopped almost immediately by a fall. It wasn't too hard to back down and climb the fault ravine a few yards to the west. We could go down a similar ravine into the bed above, and from here on the Supai talus formed the west slope into the bed. Just before 4:00 p.m., we came to a running stream that entered by a series of falls from the east. We had seen just a few standing pools lower in the Redwall so we thought it would be a good thing to camp here where there was some fairly level ground just above the junction, and lots of firewood. After eating we had a cheerful campfire that held live coals all night. My down bag seemed warm enough but I had my old trouble of night time perspiration and feeling clammy in spots.

Doug and I were both up before the stars went out and were ready to hike at 7:20 a.m. We continued up the main arm of Crazy Jug Canyon until a Supai cliff loomed ahead and to the right. We saw that we could go up to the west and around at a high level, but we took a deer trail that doubled back to the south and found some breaks in the cliff. Not long after we headed down the other side of this promontory we ran into horse tracks that appeared to be quite recent. They were a real help in finding the best way although now and then we could pick out an old trail that wasn't the same as their choice of route. However, most of the time they kept to the old route and improved it by breaking brush where it was overgrown. Something that surprised me was the prevalence of running water in this area. Before we left the main arm of Crazy Jug Canyon there was water running in the bed, and in the next two areas we also found running water. Thus we weren't too surprised to find a good stream in Timp Canyon. Here we missed the horse tracks for a short distance and crossed a little lower than the horses. Where we crossed there was a good stream that made a pleasant noise as it came down some small falls. On the return late in the afternoon, we followed the horses and were shocked to find no water at all where we had counted on using it for camping. We soon saw that the spring begins just a few yards to the south (downstream). Stina Canyon was dry except for a fairly good dripping spring off a ledge just upstream from where the trail crossed. The trail crosses Timp just above the highest bare ledge of Supai, but in Stina there is a high cliff on the south side above where the trail gets across. The horses followed a path through the oaks paralleling the bed to the west before starting to climb on the south side.

About eleven we met the pack train coming back from a four day trip. It was rather obvious that they were deer hunting in the National Park and most probably on Powell Plateau where fine bucks are often seen. We chatted with them for a few minutes but stayed carefully away from the subject of why they were there and where they had been. We saw no dead deer, but they could have been concealed under the canvas of the pack mules. They all had guns. A couple of the men in the string of four riders behind the guide expressed surprise that anyone would consider walking clear out in those wilds. By 8:45 a.m., we came to a place about one half mile northwest of Powell Spring where we figured we could get down into the bed of Saddle Canyon. This guess was correct. We had wasted a little time on a similar inspection of the short side canyon south of Stina, but this time I scrambled down into the bed where I had been twice before and thus filled in one of the three gaps I needed to cover to establish a continuous route from Saddle Mountain at the northeast boundary of the park to the west boundary beyond Thunder Spring, all of this route being north of the Colorado and below the rim.

Doug and I had talked a little of going up on the rim and walking the hunters and loggers roads back to Big Saddle, but we finally decided to see how the poachers on horseback could have come down into this area. We camped near Timp in weather that filled some of the water in the canteens and then got another 7:20 a.m. start on Friday morning. As we came along to Crazy Jug Canyon, we decided that they must have followed the high trail that goes around above the ledges where we had come up by the deer trail. We were so sure of this that we continued along a trail that seemed to be heading this way even though we could no longer see any tracks. When we realized our mistake, we were so high that we tried to cut through to the east to pick up the tracks. This wasn't easy because of the brush that was growing in a nearby area for a good many yards. Then we were about ready to go clear back to where we had last seen the tracks, we came on their tracks again. It was the best trail we had been on at any time of this trip. Clear switchbacks led up to a rather narrow slot in the Coconino. Above here, it continued to climb through about half of the Kaibab and then it leveled off to the west where it passed a concrete horse tank where the pipe no longer carries water. It went up at the end by a gentle slope to the lowest part of Big Saddle, this dip formed by a graben type movement. This is, next to the Butte Fault near the west edge of the park, about the most impressive disturbance in Grand Canyon National Park. The same fault is apparent in Saddle Canyon and formed Powell Saddle. Under an overhang of the limestone just before the trail levels out, I saw a pictograph of a type I had never seen before. It is about 15 feet up from the trail on the west side. There were fire blackened stones on the ledge and a split figure of bones, but I saw no pottery or walls. This good trail is reached by turning off the road to Crazy Jug Point a hundred yards from where it goes through a gate away from the South Big Saddle Point Road. Leave the rim at the farthest north point of the Crazy Jug Canyon bay. We conjectured that this trail was built by ranchers to pasture horses down on the Esplanade. We saw fresh tracks of a single cow on our trip.

Horseshoe Mesa and Hance Canyon
[December 4, 1966]

George Billingsley, Bruce Mitchell, and I set out with three objectives climb the butte on Horseshoe Mesa, find the old inscriptions in Hance Canyon, and climb the Redwall west of the junction of the two arms of Hance Creek. We accomplished all three, leaving the car at Grandview Point and getting back to it between 3:15 and 3:30 p.m.

There was a little snow on the trail near the top. The weather had been bad the day before and more rain fell all the next day, but we had a spectacular view as we started down with the sun breaking through low clouds. The rest of the day was overcast, but no rain fell.

I had been noticing more and more signs that parts of the trail were about to slide out. Now the place that had me worried has gone and still one can step by on the bedrock. The places where the trail is held by logs are also due to go out some day, but they may last another 20 years. We noticed three bench marks, the one shown on the east half map, another about 1200 feet below the rim and another about at the top of the Coconino.

We paused a few times for the view on the way down, but we got to the mine area in 70 minutes. I was surprised to note how fast we could come up, about 90 minutes. As we passed an open vertical shaft, George informed me that one can enter the horizontal shaft near the head of the trail off the east side of the neck and come over into the bottom of this vertical shaft. On my second trip to Horseshoe Mesa, I had gone into this horizontal shaft until it was getting completely dark and stopped just before I stepped into a partially covered hole.

In the open ground between the mine shacks and the base of the butte, George found an obsidian arrowhead, broken however. This seemed a little remarkable in view of the number of men that must have been on this plateau for quite some time.

As we approached the butte, we could see that the top 30 feet of cliffs would give us trouble. As we went up to the likeliest place on the south side, well over to the west end, we found a few foot prints. Someone had had the same idea as ours not too long before. George started up while I went around below the top cliff to the north side. I thought there should be an easier and safer route. A little after I got stopped at the end of my ledge, George and Bruce were looking down at me. I went back to their route and got up to the hard part, about halfway to the top. Several stones had been pushed together for a step in the angle. Bruce came down without help and then made a step for me with his hands. I got up to a safe place to sit, but I still had some trouble getting out of a crevice to a step from which I could go on up. We found at least three badly constructed cairns on the top at different places.

George found another way to get down, over at the eastern end into a notch. The holds are rather high for the distance one has to reach to find a place for the feet. I came down here too, but both Bruce and George supported and guided my feet for the last 10 inches.

It was now only 10:30 a.m. so we proceeded to the bed of Hance Canyon. George had been down to Horseshoe Mesa three times in the past few months, but he hadn't been into the long shaft down below on the way to the spring. This time we were able to find the old trail all the way down and over the hills almost to the Tonto. Fortunately, there will still be some trail maintenance by burros if they don't bring in any more aerial riflemen. We heard some braying over in Cottonwood Canyon, and there were also some fairly fresh signs in Hance.

According to Reider Peterson and Betty Emery, the old inscriptions are downstream from the broken wall where one can climb down from the Tonto Trail. As I had heard from Davis, they are near where the Tonto crosses the wash. I had the impression that he had said they are under an overhang on the east side. The Peterson Party were sure that they had seen the names scratched in the clay under an overhang on the west side. I led George and Bruce downstream and we searched the west wall. Around the bend to the right about 300 yards below where we reached the bed (where the clear water starts) George pointed to a pile of rocks in a horizontal crack about four feet above the bed. When we took the pile apart, we found a can of carbide and a sheet of paper in a small glass jar. It stated that this was cache #1 of the Western Speleological Institute, left in 1953. We turned and went back upstream when we came to the highest Archean rock.

I was beginning to get rather discouraged when we had passed most of the outcrops of Tapeats and had gone by considerable stretches of nothing but talus coming down on the west. Still ahead we could see one more overhanging small cliff about 30 feet high on the west. When we reached it, there were the names, some carved deeply and neatly, but most were just scratched on in a hurry. The dates ranged from 1885 to 1891. I didn't recognize any of the men except possibly Boucher. In fact the first initial was L, the middle was D, but I don't know whether that clinches the identity of Louis Boucher or throws him out. I took quite a few pictures and I hope I estimated the light all right.

We ate lunch by these names and when we were through about 12:20, we had to decide whether there was time to try the Redwall climb if our deadline for reaching the car was 4:00 p.m. We took a chance and went on to the supposed break around the angle to the southwest. The first part of the way up was obvious. There was no choice but to go over to a fracture zone against a sheer cliff to the right. We went up a slope of 45 degrees over blocks of broken material. George, the geology student, called our attention to the tilted strata and the seams where the solid rock had been thrust past similar strata below. This single track led to a more level region that was still very rough with crags. One had several choices of route above this place. We could have crossed to the south and gone up a ravine where the slope was sure, but instead we turned to the north and went up more directly in the direction we needed to follow. Here, there was one bad spot where we had to get past a chockstone. I had to have one of the boys hand my Kelty pack up after I had negotiated the hardest place. The rest was easy.

Above the Redwall, we could have kept to the level walking around the point, but since we were already rather high, we went up through the low Supai through a notch formed by a fault. On this saddle there is a cairn of undetermined age. On the other side of this pass we went down to the Redwall again and proceeded across to the trail. Along here we came to another very tall cairn for its width, about three feet high by one rock wide. These cairns made me wonder whether their builders had used the Redwall route we had just come up.

The day had been cool and the walking was all pleasant. We felt gratified that all three goals had been accomplished.

Horn and Salt Creeks
[December 19, 1966 to December 20, 1966]

Dock had sent me a copy of a plate from a USGS publication showing a trail down Horn below the Tonto Trail which turned the angle at the base of the Tapeats above the river and went west. It was shown staying high until it dropped fast by small switchbacks to the river opposite the mouth of the short canyon just east of Trinity. I had been along much of this trail down Horn. It is in the bed just below the Tonto and then goes up to a remarkably smooth grassy area on the east side. At the lower end of this, it crosses to the west of the bed and stays up rather close to the base of the Tapeats. I had thought that this led to the steep ravine which goes down to the river at the lower end of Horn Creek Rapid. I was eager to see first hand what the USGS people had noticed to the west of Horn.

A committee meeting for the math staff kept me from starting before 10:30 a.m. Monday morning. At the checking station, I was told that all trails were closed because of the recent flood, but at the District Ranger's Office they told me that only the Bright Angel Trail to Indian Gardens and Plateau Point were open. Fortunately, this was exactly what I needed.

On the way to the trailhead, I caught up with a hiker with a backpack. He was Joe Maxwell and he told me that he had had a hard time getting a permit for a solo hike. He had used my name as a precedent, but they had told him that Harvey Butchart was a special case. They had allowed him three days instead of the six he had asked for. He seemed quite impressed to meet me in the flesh when I told him my name. We had a good visit as we walked down to Indian Gardens and then turned west. He planned to take his three days to look down the side canyons and then come up the Hermit Trail.

I left Maxwell when I came to the ravine that cuts through the Tapeats about a half mile east of Horn. It is the one with the inscription H B Mar 4 06 which I had seen from above and had later photographed. It is on the right on a horizontal ledge. This time I passed it without seeing it. There was quite a little water in small pools in the bed, and even a little water was flowing. The route below the Tapeats over to Horn is marked with several cairns and in one place there is a crude rock wall as if some benighted prospector had built himself a windbreak. Allyn Cureton came across here from the Bright Angel Trail and said the walking was all right the whole way. I hadn't been here since 1959 and my memory of details was getting vague. The lone ponderosa pine is still alive although I had thought it might be dying before. To prove that I wasn't mistaking it for some more warm weather liking tree, this time I took a picture. Just east of the tree is a ravine in the granite that makes one drop down a little and use his hands for a safe passage. Since I was here before, I have learned the difference between deer and bighorn droppings. The bighorn signs outnumber the deer signs all through this area of cliffs and crags in the inner gorge. I found very fresh signs especially along the craggy ridge east of Salt Creek.

My recollection of the best descent into Horn was very uncertain. I did remember that it was south of a spur, but I couldn't remember whether it was next to the spur or one of the next two. I chose the middle one of the three and got down, but it seemed harder than I had remembered it. When I climbed up the west side and looked back, I could see that the next ravine south was out but the one next to the spur seemed rather easy, the best route providing one could reach the part that was in full view.

There was a little water running in Horn and on Tuesday I found some right where the Tonto Trail crosses.

Along the west side of Horn just below the Tapeats, the trail is still good enough to speed one's progress although once in a while one can lose it. It drops in crossing the shallow bay west of Horn and then goes up to the base of the Tapeats to continue for a quarter of a mile. When it passes a ridge which brings a view of the canyon from the north, which Kolb and Ivans pioneered as a route to the north rim, one could easily go down a not too steep ravine to the river. Since the map shows it continuing horizontally before descending, I did likewise. When I started down, I found no vestige of a trail all the way to the beach and my route was rather close to the switchbacks shown on the map. After spending the night at the most sandy beach I started up even a bit west of where I had come down. There was still no trail. I did this with the thought that I would continue along the base of the Tapeats into the nameless creek east of Salt, the one I had called Epsom from the taste of the spring in its bottom. If I had contoured about two thirds of the way up from the river, this would have been a good idea, but when I saw that I would have to lose a lot of height to cross a smooth walled ravine, I decided to backtrack into Horn. At the turn around, I noticed a well built cairn two or three feet high. Evidently this region has been prospected.

An oddity at the campsite along the river was a big but phlegmatic mosquito. He knew what was expected of mosquitoes, but he didn't survive in his struggle for existence. There were no more. Frost in the shade hadn't melted all day on the Tonto Plateau. In the inner gorge I found no frost, and it didn't freeze during the night either.

It would have paid me to drop down and climb back to the base of the Tapeats because it took one and a half hours to walk back to the head of Horn and get up to the Tonto Trail. I could have continued around into Epsom and across it into Salt more quickly than to do what I did. I left all my gear except for my lunch and canteen just off the trail and got around to where I could get down into Epsom in one and a quarter hours. Previously I had entered Epsom at the eastern of two possible entries. This time I went down just east of the promontory that separates it from Salt and stayed high on a burro trail that leads to the ridge of schist and granite that separates lower Salt from Epsom.

Reider Peterson had gone down Salt to the river just a few weeks before, staying pretty much in the bed. He had done as I had in 1960 and had bypassed the two upper obstructions including the fall that I called 250' in my log at that time. As an example of why it pays to write logs immediately, I had told him that the 250' fall had stopped me. On rereading my log, I note that it was actually the second small obstruction below the big fall, a place where I took off my pack and tried chimney climbing against the gray water polished granite. There was flowing water here in 1960 while Reider found it dry at Thanksgiving, 1966. He wriggled down this hardest place and easily went to the river. Now I figured that with his example for a spur, I could easily go down the way he had, but I thought it would be more interesting to find another route. With this ambition I followed the narrow, serrated ridge of black rock that separates Salt from Epsom. I could see an easy way down if I could reach the deep notch at the north end of the ridge. The route along this ridge is on the east side. When I came to the north end, I was convinced that I could not get down there, but I had a fair view of a ravine into Salt at the south end of the ridge. It ended at a precipice about one quarter of the way to the bed, but there was a ledge to the north which led to a broken area that I thought had possibilities. It worked out as I had hoped and was safe if one were constantly alert to test every hold. I should have built a few cairns because it is easy to forget. After going north below the top ravine, you get a little lower and start working south and down to a talus. It was an easy ten minutes walk to the river from here. From a distance there appears to be an easy walk down from the west from the top of the granite right near the river. This doesn't seem so good as you walk through the narrow gateway to the river. I didn't see where to reach the easy scramble to the base of the Tapeats.

On the return, I decided to go back along the bed and see what Reider had done. The lowest obstruction could be bypassed by a deer trail on the west. The next two are minor and can be climbed in the bed or to the east. The next was evidently where I had turned back in 1960, fairly smooth gray granite with some water flowing over the best place to stand. I gave a spring and made it up to some steps halfway to the top. I could have chimney climbed up if I hadn't been wearing the Kelty, but as it was I jumped down and returned to the route I had used on the descent. I went up a couple of places that I had avoided on the descent because I could see that the hand and toe holds were conveniently close together. It was 3:23 p.m. when I reached the Tonto Trail and an even 6:00 p.m. when I got to Indian Gardens. After eating I continued to the rim by 9:15 p.m. It was a long day since I had been walking since 7:20 a.m. except for two half hour meal breaks. I regard it as being very rewarding since I had seen two places new to me. As an added bonus, the moonlight hike up from Indian Gardens was one of great beauty.

Diamond Peak to Granite Park
[December 27, 1966 to December 31, 1966]

Jorgen Visbak spent the night with us in Flagstaff and showed me a lot of his fine pictures Monday evening. The possible hikes were restricted by the closing of the Kaibab Trail and the snow on the road west of the village. We settled on a trek to Granite Creek via the Diamond Peak Pass and the left bank of the Colorado River.

The road down Peach Springs Wash had been rerouted in several places and was quite safe. I remembered how it had been last June and kept expecting it to get bad. I lost my nerve and parked about two miles short of Diamond Creek. Actually, there would have been no difficulty in getting back from the junction, but it took us only 40 minutes to walk down to the water. The walk up to the pass was longer than it seemed from a distance and took us an hour. There was one place toward the top where it was not only steep but had an abrupt drop. On the return we found a game trail around this place using the rockslide to the east.

The east slope of Diamond Peak is quite steep, but it seems very broken and I would consider it a real possibility for me to climb. Near the top, I believe I could go up the summit ridge from the south. I had thought something of continuing upriver at the level of the pass, but we soon saw that this would involve some very rough travel. The route down to the river was much better. I noted, however, a way to climb the Redwall to the east of the pass.

We went clear down to the river before proceeding upstream, but on the return we found that there is a trail along the contour about 300 feet above the river which leaves the bed where it becomes rougher. Above this place a sort of travertine conglomerate forms an even floor. On the return we supposed that a skyline near the peak was the pass and Jorgen elected to go up out of the bed to it. I decided that I would stay in the bottom and join him at the top. I soon changed this plan and went up the next tributary to the west. I joined him at the crest of a ridge while he was enjoying the supreme thrill of our whole trip, the sight of nine bighorn sheep in one band. We tried some long range pictures as they filed across the ridges and valleys to the east. There were no real difficulties along the river up to 222 Mile Canyon, but the walking was over broken blocks, short sandbars, gravel bars, and through some mesquite. We found on the return that we made better time along the trail that leaves the immediate river vicinity about Mile 225. We reached 222 Mile Canyon at 5:00 p.m. with the interval since leaving the car at 1:20 divided up as 40 minutes to reach Diamond Creek, an hour to get up to the pass, a little less to get to the river, and a bit more than an hour to walk to Mile 222. There was enough wood and room to put our bags on fairly level sand. On the return Jorgen even located a shelter big enough for two under an overhanging block of diabase about a hundred yards up the slope. In the morning, we made our way almost immediately past a big outcrop of diabase. This material cracks up in odd shaped lumps and seems to acquire a shiny desert varnish. The walking was easy to Mile 221.1 but here the igneous rock comes right down steeply into the water. We tackled the traverse on ledges about 50 feet above the river to get through all right. This was better than our choice on the return, a climb up to the base of the sedimentary rock and a steep descent of around 400 feet. The going near the river was easy to Mile 219.6 where we had to decide whether to go up a ravine to the north or try to climb by the black rock cliffs along the river. After getting by the first difficulty where we took off our packs and passed them by hand, we came to a nearly vertical climb. I went up the first pitch with my pack on my back, but Jorgen didn't trust the rotten rock and precarious holds. I scouted ahead and came back with the report that we would be certainly stopped ahead. The return down the small cliff was worse than the ascent and I had to let my pack down by a string until Jorgen could support it. Then I tossed my canteen down to the sand. Jorgen thought that it would stay where it landed, so he didn't try to catch it. Instead it rolled into the river. He acted fast and plunged in getting one very wet foot in order to save the canteen. We got back to the ravine and ate lunch before going on. In this ravine at Mile 219.2, we saw some copper ore, blue and green streaks in the Tapeats Sandstone. At the top of the ravine we dropped down a short way to cross a small wash and then climbed higher and toward the river beyond. On the return, we found that we were paralleling a trail through here. When we were descending to a more uniform contour walk along a bluff above the river, we found the trail. In coming back we followed the trail more consistently and found a mining claim containing a legal paper with the information that in 1957 Fred Mahone, a Hualapai Indian, was reviving a claim that was first discovered in 1921. From about Mile 219 to Mile 214.5 we were able to follow the trail quite well and the miles went by easily. The vistas were fine along here also. There were impressive rapids in the river and the side canyons looked intriguing. The river sheet names one Trail Canyon, presumably indicating an access route for the burros that seemed much more prevalent along the right bank than on the left, a condition that held true all the way to Granite Park. It also seemed that the walking might have been faster along that side.

We found that the springs were as shown on the river sheet with water in the canyon at Mile 220.5 and more and better water at Mile 215.5. As we approached Mile 214, it was getting close to 5:00 p.m. and we chose a campsite soon after we were past another outcrop of black diabase. At this outcrop we made the mistake of following the terrace above the river along the shelf of Tapeats Sandstone. We were not stopped but it was slow getting by the huge black igneous rock. We camped opposite 214 Mile Creek. It turned out that this was a fine campsite with quite a bit of wood and even a shelter under a leaning rock that we had to use during the rain that arrived the second night of our stay here. It had been eight and one half hours since we had broken camp, but we had wasted an hour on the attempt to force a way along the river instead of leaving it at the copper deposit.

On Thursday morning we started a little earlier than before and promptly made the mistake of getting too high on the talus slope. There were two or three ravines just above the river. There seemed to be no more trail but there were no definite obstacles either. We covered the five river miles to Granite Park between 8:15 and 11:40 a.m. The area was most interesting and the broad plain at the mouth of Granite Creek formed quite a contrast with most of the Grand Canyon. The island is quite a landmark. As we walked over the dune near the east slope just south of the creek bed, I found some potsherds, and when we inspected an overhang at the top of the dune, Jorgen found a small bone that had been decorated with parallel scratches and had a hole drilled through one end.

When we were rounding the bend at Mile 213 on the return, Jorgen saw something that I had just walked by only a few yards away, a mineral spring that had been reported by John Harrington who had come all this way up from Lake Mead. John had been so busy keeping the boat off the rocks that he hadn't been able to remain oriented on the map and he wanted us to get the location of the spring. The spring water is the same bilious yellow green as that of the Sipapu in the Little Colorado. Similarly there is a good deal more gas coming up than water. The temperature of the pool was higher than that of the river, but it was no warmer than would be expected of a constant yearly average. The most interesting feature is the smooth, nearly vertical dam that curves around the pool and separates it from the river. The rim of this dam was about eight feet above the river level. There was an interesting indentation in the Tapeats shelf about Mile 212.6 which would have made a good landing for boaters if the river had been higher. During the evening there was no wind, but before 8:00 p.m. we noticed that no stars were showing. Jorgen found the good shelter with his flashlight and about 1:30 a.m. we had to move into it since the drizzle had started. We had to do some shifting later when the water began dripping right on Jorgen. In the morning the world had undergone a fantastic change. Fog and falling snow obscured all the higher buttes and snow had whitened the benches to within a few hundred feet above us. We walked until nearly noon in the light rain and hoped that the sun would dry things before it was time to camp. There were very few natural shelters where the floor was level enough. After several false starts the sun finally showed, but by the time we had reached our site at Mile 222, it had set behind the cliff. It took seven hours to come from Mile 214.

Attempted descent at Mile 21.9
[January 14, 1967]

The first time I had followed Reilly's lead and had gone down the small canyon at Mile 21.7, I had been unable to find a rappel less route through the Coconino. When I tried again with a rope along, I found a way through that formation without a rope, but I had run out of time when I came to the Supai rim above the river. The falls in the main canyon are obviously impassible, but I had gotten the impression that the secondary ravine to the south might furnish a passage. The main purpose of this hike was to see whether this route would go.

Chuck Johnson, student, and Betty Emery, instructor, came with me. Perhaps as much by luck as by map reading, we found almost the best approach by car to Piute Cave on the north rim of the right canyon. We left the highway as usual a little north of Curve Wash just beyond a turnoff to a group of Navaho houses that are east of the highway. At the fork very close to the bed of the small wash in the bedrock, I kept to the left. I had thought that the two branches would soon rejoin, but I was up on the top of the ridge before I saw a track coming from the north. I turned right here and soon had to decide whether to turn left on a long straight stretch that went northwest down across a sloping plain or keep to the right. We took the right, but before long we found ourselves going back to the highway with a sheep corral in the valley down to the left. We returned to the straight road to the northwest and stayed on the main track. At one place we passed up a hogan that would have meant a left turn. Beyond here there were no tracks in the shallow snow. The road bothered me by turning almost north or even a little east for a while, but then swung northeast again. We kept up on a ridge and came to a place where we would have had a steep descent to a stock tank to the right and here we parked. We headed, on foot, west toward the rim of a canyon that had developed in the valley to the south and found that this was Mile 21.7 Canyon. We found wheel tracks down off the ledge to the south and these led right to Piute Cave. We could have driven right to the cave if we had made an obscure turn back about a half mile, but walking time from the car to the cave was only 15 minutes.

The snow in the bottom of the canyon made the footing precarious and I fell more than once. At the drop offs in the bed where one had to get down by small footholds, fortunately there was little or no snow. Where the canyon comes out on the wall at the top of the Coconino, there was a little snow on the exposed ledge, which made me move along here with extreme caution.

As we arrived at this place, Chuck pointed to a precariously balanced pile of large blocks of stone resting on a thin slab that was standing on edge. We almost felt that we shouldn't shout as we passed below.

I was slow in getting down the Coconino over to the south to the ledge that is the key to the descent, but while Chuck was looking around for my route, I caught up and went along the lower ledge to the east and down to the talus. At a place on the lower talus, I pointed out fossil footprints on a block of Coconino.

It took us two hours to go from the car to the rim of the Supai where I had stopped before. Here Betty decided to stay and take some pictures of the river. Then Chuck and I went over to the bed of the ravine to the south, we could see at once that we were stopped (Doty found the way down from here). We ate an early lunch out on the point above the river. I noted three only slightly submerged rocks just to the right of the middle of the river about Mile 21.6. We reached the car in 115 minutes. Just below the cave, Chuck showed us a wildcat that I had passed about six feet away. It was a thrill to see how easily it could get down and up the other side of the canyon.

Moran Point to the head of Papago Bay
[February 4, 1967]

Norvel Johnson and I parked at Moran Point about 9:00 a.m. and went along the rim to the east. My main objective was to get a precise location for the ruin that David Hunt had shown to Marshall Scholing and me on July 4, 1961. David had said that he thought Zuni Point was one or two points west of where he showed us a small promontory with a wall facing the main rim. As I remembered it after five and a half years, the charcoal drawing on the wall of a shallow overhang was just back from the point to the west. I also have a picture taken here of a small wall showing some clay construction. It didn't take us long to reach this site from the highway, probably not more than ten minutes. David had been shown a mark along the road where we should leave it to walk to the rim.

The rim between Moran and Zuni Points didn't appear to offer any suggestion of a promontory or overhang. Beyond Zuni, we often got just below the rim and checked under overhanging rocks or little cavities, but with no success, until we came to the point that separates the bays of the two arms of Papago Canyon a hundred yards to the southeast there was another point that has an outlier butte with a crude wall on it. To reach the top we had to go southeast about 50 yards. Norvel got down one place but I went a little farther and went down a notch in the rim. On our way back to the isolated platform, we passed a low ceilinged cave that was partially closed with a wall. We had a rather difficult climb up a notch on the east side of the citadel to the top. There appeared to be little evidence that this outlier had been more than a temporary fort. On the west side and 50 feet lower at the farthest north, one can go along the bench. There is a hollow that is still sheltered by an adobe wall. West of this is an impressive limestone tower with a scree filled slope going down to the north between this tower and the butte with the wall on it. My impression is that one would not get far down before coming to a cliff.

About halfway from here to the deepest part of the Papago Canyon Bay were two more promontories with construction on them. One seemed too easily reached from the rim to be worth while for defense, but when we walked out on it, we noted low ruined walls outlining about five rooms. I should have carried a pencil and marked them on the piece of map which I had along, but almost as soon as we had passed on, the exact location for these ruins began to seem hazy. When we hit the highway at the head of the east arm of Papago Canyon, we had time to walk back to Moran Point and come back along the rim looking once more for the overhang with the charcoal drawing, but we still couldn't locate it. I began to wonder whether it could have been east of Papago Point.

When we were looking across to the east side of the Papago Canyon wall, we noted a place where there is almost a sure route through the Redwall, and above it one could walk up a long talus slope clear through the Supai. At the near approach of the highway to the head of Papago, one can walk down through the Kaibab and some of the Coconino. We couldn't see the rest of the formation, but it would bear checking. There is also another break in the rim farther east where one could go through most of the Coconino, but the bottom appears bad. Investigating these places would be a one day project. It would be interesting to find that there is still another route from the rim to the river, down into Papago and then east to the mouth of 75 Mile Canyon (or right down Papago three ways). At times we were on the old road out to Zuni Point.

I believe this is the place I was looking for. If we had gone back from the point below the rim to the west, we would have found the charcoal drawing (no success on February 18, 1967).

Ruins above Papago Canyon and two false descents
[February 18, 1967]

I still thought I should be able to locate the ruins shown in the pictures taken on July 4, 1961 when David Hunt took us to the rim which he called east of Zuni point. This time I parked not far west of the low point in the road at the head of Papago Canyon and walked along the rim to the northeast. I kept the map in my hand and consulted it frequently. This was not the complete answer to my difficulties, because there are minor promontories so small that they are not shown on the east half map.

About a fourth of the way from the head of Papago Canyon to Zuni Point, there is a narrow promontory shown. It is the one mentioned in my former log as having no value for defense, but there are outlines of rooms on it. On this second trip, I also ran across a couple of rooms just west of the base of this projection. Across a small bay to the west, there is a lesser promontory with a slight notch separating it from the rim. Norvel and I had gone up on it and found quite a few ruined walls. Today when I got out my black and white picture of Hunt and Scholing standing near a wall, I could make a positive identification with this wall and background. This was the promontory with the vestigial wall protecting a pocket under the cliff 50 feet down on the west side. A triple tower just to the west of this shelter makes a good landmark. When I was sure that David Hunt had taken us here, I was ready to swear that the overhang with the charcoal drawing would have to be nearby. I climbed down still lower and went west but found nothing that I was looking for. On the return I looked to the west at a higher level, but the charcoal drawing seems to be lost.

I already had the location for the isolated flat rock that involved the difficult climb mentioned in the previous log. It is the first projection southeast of the point that divides the two arms of Papago Creek. I recognized the small cave with the little wall on the lower approach from the east. In continuing along the rim around the next part of this bay, I found three rooms only a few yards from the rim at the southernmost bay part of this bay. At the double point directly east of the double point named Zuni, I turned back. On the return, I was able to walk right to the room outlines at the head of the bay, but I may have missed one of the sites in the woods that I had seen on the way out.

After eating lunch and looking some more for the charcoal drawing, I spent about two and one half hours checking two possible descents into Papago Canyon. The one at the head of the canyon went smoothly until I came to the beginning of the Coconino. Here I spent some time looking at two places before selecting my first thought as the best. I was able to go down 60 or 80 feet of Coconino, but then I was stopped. When I tried the place about a third of a mile farther towards Papago Point, I had to look a bit to get through the top ledges of Kaibab, but it was fairly easy and safe to get to the top of the Coconino. As I had planned from the rim across the bay, I went down to a neat little tower of red Toroweap Sandstone and then entered the ravine that had looked quite promising. A daredevil probably could go down here halfway through the formation (fairly safe through to the Hermit). However, since it seemed impossible to go lower than that, I didn't press my luck and returned to the rim.

There was still some snow left in the shade below the rim although the most recent precipitation in Flagstaff was several weeks ago. I would guess that the inhabitants of these dwellings along the rim may have used these houses only at certain seasons. They could get water by melting snow through much of the winter. Although living on the canyon rim would be cold, the Indians would have plenty of firewood.

Diamond Creek to 234 Mile Canyon
[March 27, 1967 to March 28, 1967]

The road down Peach Springs Wash was still in fair shape although spots of loose gravel and sand made me worry on the return. I hit them faster than 20 mph in second gear and had no trouble getting through. If I had bogged down, I would have put on chains. The car was left at the junction of the wash and Diamond Creek just past the rise where trash from an old camp can still be found.

Since I couldn't remember clearly any route to the Tonto level nearer the river, I climbed up directly to the west. On the return I found that there is a break in a narrow ravine that reaches the creek almost a mile closer to the river. As you approach the river along the Tonto, you get an impressive view of Diamond Peak, and from this angle you realize that it has two summits, the north one being the harder (easier) to climb and also almost surely the higher. It appears to be a real challenge.

At the sacrifice of fine views down at the river, one can save some time as well as more distance by climbing over ridges. The first chance occurs very soon. I followed the burro trail along the contour out above the river, but I am sure I could have climbed up through the gap in a ridge in less time. There are plenty of burros in this area, and they increase in numbers west of Travertine Creek. The trail is rather faint east of Mile 238 Canyon, but there are clear burro trails, usually at more than one level about everywhere else.

An observation that suggested a future project was an apparent route through the Redwall across the river from the mouth of Diamond Creek. To get out of the inner gorge, one should go up a draw a bit to the west (east) of Diamond rapid and then follow the Tonto around into a bay to the east. The very top of the Redwall seems to offer the only possible obstacle (east better OK). One might camp at the river and then cross, reach the top of the Redwall, and cross the higher elevations to Kelly Spring in one day. Going down Separation or Trail Canyon would make an interesting loop trip.

For the first several miles to the west of Diamond, just about every ravine on the south side of the river shows at least one break through the Tapeats Sandstone and hence there are lots of escape routes from the river. West of Mile 228, these breaks become scarcer, but they still seem commoner than breaks in the Tapeats in the familiar Bright Angel section. Something else that really surprised me was the prevalence of seep springs. Between Travertine Canyon and Bridge Canyon, the side canyon with no spring at the base of the Tapeats seemed to be the exception, and there always seemed to be a burro trail down to these seeps. Water above the Tapeats rim was very unusual, but there were wet spots in the bay just west of 228 Mile Canyon and of course Ervin's good spring from near the base of the Redwall from the east side of 234 Mile Canyon. Travertine Canyon has the most copious flow, almost as much as you find in Spencer Canyon. I saw a place where a man might climb the Redwall out of 228 Mile Canyon, back from the river on the east side but not back to the head. This looks easier than where Ervin climbed out in 234 Mile Canyon. However, 228 is so close to Diamond, it would pay a man to follow the Tonto east and then walk out Peach Springs Wash.

Despite the drought, there were quite a few flowers blooming. Beaver Tail Cacti were the most beautiful, but I believe I prefer the delicate Mariposa lily. Small migratory birds were also plentiful and their songs were unusual in the dry canyon. I watched for crucifixion thorn and found plenty growing at frequent intervals in the north facing bays. It is thicker on the slopes near the base of the Redwall. Ocotillo was still more prevalent all along the Tonto. Something that I had never before noticed were lots of Ocotillo with bark bitten off and the whole stalk covered. One stump had grown to jumbo size, 15 to 18 feet tall and the individual stalks were two and a half or three inches in diameter. Still only three stalks were standing and the rest lay around on the ground, cut off about five feet from the ground. The fresh bark had been chewed off. Something else that amazed me was to see staghorn cactus likewise with sections cut through as if the burros had found a way to use it for food. If they are reduced to eating Ocotillo and staghorn cactus, I would say that they must be hard up for forage. The Tonto did seem much more bare of vegetation than in the Bright Angel section where it is a good thousand feet higher.

If anything the walls of the Lower Granite Gorge from Mile 228 to Bridge Canyon seemed steeper than they do higher up the river. There were places where the dark walls seemed almost as steep as El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. One could stand on the Tapeats rim and look almost directly down on the river. When one considers the rapids with no visible gravel bars or ledges beside them, the feat of the Wheeler Party in getting rowboats upstream seems nearly incredible. It also amazes me that there would be any men in that party willing to take the boats back down to Fort Mohave. I should think that they would have seen enough of those rapids to last them a lifetime.

The Tonto burro trail seems just about as circuitous along here as it is in the Bright Angel section, about three times as long as the river mileage. After leaving our car at 9:50 a.m., I sat in the shade of some rocks in 238 Mile Canyon for a late lunch and was ready to start climbing out of Travertine Canyon five and one half hours after leaving the car. Filling two half gallon canteens in Travertine, I went on at 3:30 p.m. and stopped at a dry camp only a couple of yards from the rim of the inner gorge about 6:40 p.m. just before reaching 232 Mile Canyon. The immediate reason for stopping just where I did was that I found a dead catclaw for firewood within easy reach below the rim. I slept right on the trail with plenty of rocks to wake me if I should start to roll towards the brink.

The winter weight down bag was a bit on the warm side, but I slept rather well free of the biting flies that were a real pest where I had lunch both days in canyon beds, 228 and Travertine. The weather both days was mainly overcast, and about midnight, it seemed as though a storm might finally do something. I hadn't scouted for overhangs by daylight, so I resolved to wait until the rain began and then put the plastic sheet over me, but instead the sky cleared up.

I ate breakfast before it was really light and got started walking by 5:55 a.m. with the main destination Ervin's Spring. This took one and a half hours, so I figured that there wasn't time to make my way down to the river where he had probably come up. I did spend more time following the rim above Mile 234 Canyon and east above the river, and I have about decided that there isn't any way to come up from the river between the mouth of the canyon and the place along the river where I took the overlapping pictures last summer. I didn't locate the projecting rock, however. If I took another two day trip in from Bridge Canyon I would have time to investigate this point further. If I were a good enough climber, I would like to get back to the car by Ervin's climb up the Redwall.

I got back to my pack just as I had planned at 9:30 a.m. It took me about 15 minutes less time to get back to the car than it had to come away from the car the first day. I took fewer pictures and I also cut across ridges away from the river. This was a loss as I failed to see Travertine Falls on the return, but I hope my picture the first day shows all right. There is a fine landmark at the head of 232 Mile Canyon just south of where I slept, a small butte capped by red sandstone standing out away from the Redwall. It is visible for miles, probably east of Travertine, and Diamond Peak is visible from west of Travertine.

On the west side of a short side canyon east of 228 Mile Canyon, there is an unusual outcropping of some metamorphic or igneous rock that comes up higher than the prevailing level of the Tapeats Sandstone. Above the rim of this, possibly gneiss, I found the only indication that Indians had once used this barren area, a mescal pit. It may have been fairly recent since I noted bits of charcoal.

Upper Beaver Canyon and Wescogame Point
[April 9, 1967]

Allyn Cureton has been doing a lot of looking at roads and routes to the west of Havasu Canyon, and I was certainly happy to have him as a companion and guide. He knew that we should turn off the main Supai road to Camp 16. We went through several stretched wire gates, the first one to the south of the house at Camp 16. I believe we were following the road that goes past Higgins Tank, shown on the National Canyon Quad but the road now goes to the west of the tank. North of the tank it forks, and since we had elected to go to Beaver Canyon first, we took the west fork. The place marked Bishop Camp on the map must be where we saw a burnt down building. There was a gate a mile inside the monument boundary where we turned due west for 0.6 of a mile. A pile of white rocks used to mark the turnoff to the north, but no car tracks show for about 100 yards north of the cairn. When you drive north and zigzag a bit, you soon pick up the track. At VABM 5947 there is a survey marker, and soon after you have to go over some mean rocks in the track. There are a number of other rocky places along these roads both here and on the way to Wescogame Point. It takes something over an hour to reach these positions from the main Supai road. The fork near the road end at Beaver Canyon seems more used than the continuation to Yumtheska Point.

At the end of this road, no trail is immediately evident, but when one follows the draw north 50 yards, he comes to the rim. You stay to the right and soon see the trail going down a few yards and then to the right under the first small cliff. It goes down and to the right at times using cracks between blocks leaning out from the wall. At one place the whole trail is supported on old juniper logs. They appear to have been cut by a steel axe. The trail below has many switchbacks in a steep scree slope and after swinging to the east finally cuts to the west to get through the Coconino in the middle of the canyon.

There is a long slope covering the Hermit Shale with soil which supports a thick growth of blackbrush before one comes to the canyon through the Supai Sandstone. The trail which had been patently artificial up in the Kaibab and Coconino was only intermittently seen in the canyon. Some burro droppings were to be found but these were not as numerous as the bighorn sign along the upper part of the trail. Three springs are located in the lower half of the Supai. Just below the middle one, the bed drops off sharply at three steps which together account for more than the 40 feet cited by Ives. A ladder might be helpful here, but now the trail is plainly constructed up on the left side to bypass about one quarter mile of the south steep bed. If Ives had been coming down this canyon, he could easily have gone up along this slope even if no trail were there. I am not seriously proposing this as Ives' route since it is such a long walk from here to the village. In this impressively steep and narrow canyon we found several redbud trees blooming, and on the Hermit level shrubs were in bloom. Two Mariposa tulips were in bloom near the top of the Redwall. When we reached our former trail along the rim of the Redwall, we had lunch and then returned to the car. It took one and one half hours to get down and two and one quarter to get back.

We could see that there wouldn't be time to go down below the Coconino at Wescogame, but we drove over there anyway so I would know the route. I am not sure that the National Canyon Quad shows the road we took to get across. It leaves the way we took north at a huge earthen dam across the Little Coyote Canyon drainage. This dam looks rather new and the road follows the rather narrow crest. If a lake would fill behind this dam, it could be 60 feet deep, an unlikely amount of water.

Allyn's system to get down from Wescogame is to go out along the narrow ridge nearly to the end. On the northwest side of the end are three junipers and the descent is about 150 yards back to the southwest from these. It is plenty steep, especially near the top. He goes down here clear to the top of the Coconino and then turns to the right along a distinct trail, thanks to bighorn sheep. The route through the Coconino past a chockstone requires a rope for one's pack. He reports an easier way through the Coconino on the opposite side of the point, but he reaches this from the same rim descent.

Wescogame Point and Diamond Peak
[May 13, 1967 to May 14, 1967]

Allyn had showed me the way to drive to the plateau approach to Wescogame Point, about 17 miles from the main Supai road via Camp 16, the modern home with a TV aerial. Reider Peterson and I walked out on the end of the Wescogame and ate an early lunch. It looked simpler to walk down to the bed of the wash on the west side of the rim rather than to go directly down where Allyn had showed me that we should get directly down to the top of the Coconino. It was quite a bit longer the way we went down, but we found more of the surprisingly good trail than we would have by Allyn's route. We felt fairly sure that the Indians must have cut some of this in the steep clay bank but that it is now used mostly by deer and bighorn sheep.

When we got to the place on the north side where Allyn had come down, I couldn't see much future in going clear down to the rim of the Coconino. It seemed that one would very soon come to a corner where there was no way to proceed. When we went on without a trail above the bottom cliff of Toroweap, we soon saw that there would be no other place to go down. We backed up around one corner and went down where Allyn had said to. The route was quite spectacular around the corner at the top of the Coconino. Reider walked a ledge about five feet lower than the one I was on. I had to get down on all fours to get by a low overhang, but he had to clamber up from his ledge just east of this place. He saw a pile of stepping stones here. Beyond here the trail again became quite distinct.

When we came to the cleft through the Coconino that Allyn had used both on the north descent and to the south, I got a shock. One has to get down an almost vertical 25 foot wall before he is in either cleft. After a bit of searching, we found a way. Reider tried to descend first and got down halfway before getting stuck. A few feet to the south I saw a place with more holds and steps. Just where it was getting hard I found a perfectly placed short groove in the sandstone and then I noticed that it still showed the marks of a sharp tool which had been used to cut it. When we started down the cleft to the south, we noticed a cairn and definite short switchbacks. Halfway down the Coconino there is a large chockstone but it can be bypassed to the side. In getting back to the center of the ravine, I noticed a couple of footholds that had been gouged out with a sharp tool. On the shale below, we figure that the obscure route probably goes to the left down the shale to the head of Horse Trail Canyon. We went out on the Esplanade to the rim south of Horse Trail Canyon and got a fine view of the village area and the wide part of the canyon to the south.

After getting above the Coconino on the return, we followed the trail back to the bed of the wash where I had left my pack and then went up the bed before going up to the plateau. This is probably the fastest way to reach the car although Allyn's route along the top to the three junipers and then straight down through the Kaibab and Toroweap is the fastest way to go down. Saturday evening Allyn met us and we ate in Truxton since the cafe in Peach Springs was temporarily closed. It was 11:00 p.m. by the time we were getting into sleeping bags where Peach Springs Wash meets Diamond Creek. I remembered Davis' report concerning mosquitoes at this place, but it seemed too cool for them. However, before the night was over, Allyn especially had been bothered. I had only one. Before the night was over, I was willing to exchange my light down bag for the winter one.

I hadn't hiked much this spring and I was afraid I had gotten out of condition. It was gratifying to see that I could walk from the creek to the pass in 40 minutes, only two thirds as long as it had taken Jorgen and me with heavy packs. We spent some time with our cameras and then looked carefully at the east side of the peak. We concluded that my former idea was erroneous. We decided to go up the talus to the base of the continuous cliff and turn to the north. At first we thought that we should go about twice as far as we actually did. We went around the first point and started the real climbing just south of a big crucifixion thorn tree. From here our route led up and to the south. On the ascent we thought we had to go up a nearly vertical route just north of two small pinnacles. We noted tufts of flowers growing on their tops to serve as a guide in getting back down. However, on the return, the descent seemed so formidable that we tried going around them to the south. This proved to be quite an improvement but it did involve the uncertainty of getting around a point right below the two towers. Above the towers, the route switched up and to the north. There was one particularly steep place where an Ocotillo serves as a guide post. Up here where we had been using our fingers and toes to get up the steep pitches, I was startled to find droppings of a deer and also of bighorn sheep. We actually found tracks toward the north ridge. We reached the summit along this ridge where one felt a bit more like crouching than walking along the yard wide crest. There was no previous cairn on the summit.

Allyn came up with his camera tripod occupying one hand, but he admitted that he had to put it down and use both hands at a number of places. I was willing to settle for the north summit only, which I considered a foot or so higher than the south summit. Reider found that one can get down from the north summit to the saddle between them and go over to the south. He built the cairn there just after I had finished mine on the north. When we looked from the top down to the slopes from the south, west, and east, we agreed that we had found the only practical route up for non technical climbers. We thought that we had been pretty lucky in route finding because there hadn't been any real conviction that what we were trying would go.

It took us less than two hours to get from the creek to the top of Diamond Peak even allowing time for plenty of pictures. The return was done slightly slower. I seemed to be the most timid on the return. There were lots of safe holds at the steep places, but there were also lots of places where we were forced to walk on lose pebbles lying on the slope. I wanted to hold onto something almost all the time. I was about to conclude that I ought to leave this sort of climbing to younger men. It was about as difficult as Weaver's Needle in the Superstition Mountains.

When we went down to the river in the car, I found that the road for the last one and one fourth miles is no improvement over the previous parts. I bumped the frame a couple of times and a new sound may mean that I have punched a hole in the muffler. We were surprised to find five or six cars down by the river. One can drive up on the dune to a turn around or along the creek to the river.

There must have been quite a few picnickers and fishermen using this road during the time since they improved it. Almost all the pieces of granite boring samples have been picked up. To prove that I had seen such things two years ago, I brought out the only piece I could still locate.

Kolb and South Rim ruins
[May 20, 1967]

James sounded so sure that Mallery Grotto was worth seeing that I still wanted to find it. Earlier I had been searching far out toward Maricopa Point. This time I looked much closer for overhangs about where the rim turns north to form the west side of the bay formed by the Garden Creek drainage. After 10 or 15 minutes here I went over to see whether Emery Kolb could be of more assistance than the rangers at the Visitor's Center.

In front of the studio sweeping the sidewalk was an Indian, probably a Supai, who works for Emery. He knew nothing of any pictographs nearby, but he told me about a couple of pictures down below the first water station around the next switchback. They are on a large boulder beside a bit of the old trail above the present one.

While I was talking to the lady who manages the store, Emery phoned upstairs. He was up and invited me to come down and talk. We had quite a visit, for about an hour. He said that when he had last seen the pictographs that James must have been thinking of, there was only a piece of one deer left. He gave a rather exact location for the overhang, below and about 150 feet east of the parking viewpoint where the blacktop road comes to the rim at the head of the Bright Angel Trail.

During my subsequent search, at first I stayed too high and found a mine shaft that is small but has turns causing the end to be completely dark. It is hard to see why a miner would expect wealth in the solid Kaibab Limestone just eight feet below the surface. When I finally went down through three or four ledges to a steep dirt slope only 40 or so feet above the present trail and followed tracks to the east, I came to the real thing. It is a little to the west of the fin of rock through which they cut a tunnel for the Bright Angel Trail, and the overhang is distinctly below the top of this projection. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are numerous deer and some geometrical designs left. In fact the only way in which there is any deterioration is that numerous tourists have scratched their initials in the rock and some have put them on over the old pictures with a spray can of paint. I believe it would certainly be no worse if the park service constructed a trail down here and made it seem more public. The original pictographs are all done with red clay pigment and show more fine lines than most. Deer antlers are rendered with a great many branches. There are also some heavy bodied animals, pregnant sheep, such as one can find at Canyon DeChelly. I didn't see any great similarity to the markings in Havasu Canyon at its junction with Lee. These so near to civilization are also the best spread I am aware of in the Grand Canyon (more near Thor's Hammer). More study could be done on pictographs to try to connect them with certain cultures.

After leaving word of the location of Mallery Grotto at the Visitor's Center, I drove east of Moran Point to the next picnic area and then walked to the rim to try again to locate my lost pictures of the ruin under an overhang having the charcoal decoration on the wall. I reached the rim in the bay just east of Zuni Pint and went to the right. I ate lunch on the point that separates the two arms of Papago Canyon and soon came to the defense ruin to the east. I gave up the search before reaching the cluster of rooms on the promontory where I took the recognizable picture.

The final project for the day was to find the cliff dwellings around the bay to the northeast of Desert View first located for me by Ranger Bill Tanner and later photographed by Betty Emery and Reider Peterson. They are very low ceilinged, about three feet high, but are quite well protected from the weather and are well preserved. One feature is that the builders plastered juniper logs into the relatively thin walls. The overhang is so low that one has to crawl to reach the farther rooms. There are signs of other construction at a lower and higher level in the same general area, the south face of the promontory that forms the north side of the large bay east of Desert View. The main row of rooms is reached by going down a slide area about 150 feet below the rim.

Conversation with Emery Kolb
[May 20, 1967]

Emery was able to tell me where to look for Mallery Grotto, the best showing of Indian pictographs in the Grand Canyon. Then we talked about various things of mutual interest. I was right in supposing that he and John Ivens kept their boat in a cove quite a bit downstream from the mouth of Pipe Creek. They would go from Indian Gardens out to the west along the Tonto to the slot through the rim cliffs where I found the inscription H B Mar 4 06. Emery repeated the story about their trip down to the boat, downriver to Hermit and back to the rim in one day in time to give the evening lecture. They portaged around Horn and Monument (Granite) Rapids. He also gave the figure of his trotting down the yellow streaked ravine on the north side east of Horn from the base of the Tonto to the river as 23 minutes.

Emery also gave me some more details of his trip with Ivens downstream past Horn, up the nameless canyon east of horn, up between Isis and Shiva, to the rim and back by the Bright Angel Trail. He said they camped the first night at a spring near the base of the Kaibab east of Shiva Saddle. At noon the next day they had lunch with Jimmie Owens at his cabin which stood where the mule barns are now, in Harvey Meadow. During the afternoon they went on to the head of the Bright Angel Trail and got down it as far as the base of the Redwall. He implied that they returned to the south rim on the third day. I asked him what they did with the boat. He said he couldn't recall ever going after it and in fact the idea had never occurred to him before. He tried hard to recall whether they had ever returned to get the boat but his mind was blank on that point. He could remember many details such as which chicken coop they had dismantled to get wood for the frame and how they had covered it with canvas and that the boat weighed 100 pounds, but he couldn't remember whether they had abandoned the boat or had gone back to get it along the north side of the river.

Emery's stories haven't changed perceptibly since I first heard them several years ago. He had the impression that the Scientists had climbed Shiva in 1938 instead of 1937, but I could well understand mixing up dates of events of which one is a participant. He said that he purposely discarded some film boxes in plain sight on top of Shiva and built cairns on all four corners before the scientific party arrived. New to me was the information that he had seen a rabbit on top and the skulls of two stags with their antlers locked so that they had both died of starvation after a battle. Also new to me was that Eddie McKee had found potsherds on top of Shiva.

Emery also talked a bit about the prospector that they stopped to visit with on their way down the river a few miles upstream from Diamond Creek. He also told me more about the time he and Ellsworth visited Blue Springs. They rode mules to the head of the trail with a survey party and went down and back the same day. He didn't know that the last part of the way through the top of the Redwall is easy if you go upstream 50 yards. They climbed down a cottonwood tree that was growing up against the cliff. I am sure there is no cottonwood nearby now. It is hard for me to understand how anyone would miss seeing the easy way to the bottom after finding the much more difficult route higher up.

After about an hour of such chatter, Emery was tired enough to go to bed again. He parted on excellent terms and I promised to show him the inscription pictures from Hance Canyon. He had never been down the Old Hance Trail, and he knew nothing of Hance's rock cabin.

Emery remembered the ponderosa pine below the Tapeats near his route to the boat. He also remembered the waterfall in Phantom Canyon and said that they got past it right near the fall by helping each other up the cliff.

Impressions from the air
[May 23, 1967]

Again Bill Martin took me on a day that was overcast and showing a few rain squalls by the time we could get away, about 2:30 p.m. Reider Peterson went along, but the others let me call the route. I got quite a few good looks at a number of climbing possibilities. I hope my pictures come out well since I snapped quite a few with the idea that I could look at them later rather than try to study the region and remember the features.

There is an almost sure route through the Redwall on the southwest side of Apollo. The ravine separating Jupiter from the ridge to Venus should also go, but one would very likely not be able to follow this ridge over to Venus. Another picture shows a likely place to come down the Tapeats on the south side of Point Chiavria and east of Juno Ruin. Another picture may be worth studying for a route to the top of Gunther on the west. Hutton and Duppa were close to our level and made a fine show.

I pointed out Goldwater's Bridge to Reider but it didn't show well in the shadows. He may not have made it out. We had to circle to gain enough altitude to go over the shale ridges near Kibbey Butte. The ravine at the base of Kibbey is easy through the Redwall, but the top cliff of Supai may be impossible. Surely one could get through it somewhere not too far away (to S. R. Cave and around or directly). I believe now that the trail Art Lange found going down toward Kibbey somehow connected with this ravine and was built to go clear down to the bed of Nankoweap.

The tributaries of Nankoweap and Kwagunt are striking as they penetrate back into the Redwall. I snapped some shots in here that I probably won't be able to identify. Another shot shows the Coconino remnant in the Kwagunt Lava Saddle and I got a close one of Siegfried Pyre. I was so busy looking at it that I didn't look down for Hartman Bridge. I tried for a picture of the rope route down from the north side of Cape Final and I got quick shots of Juno and Jupiter. We weren't very close to the parallel ravines through the Coconino below the Walhalla Glades parking, but I tried for a picture here. I let the out thrust Coconino that I had seen from north of Desert View escape without a shot, and I also missed taking one of the chute next of Wotan, and I tried for pictures of the protruding ridge and also of the two easy places to walk up the slope west of it.

We went rather close above the top of Zoroaster and Reider and Bill said they saw a cairn. I got a picture that pretty well covered the summit. I can't see how one can climb the upper Supai just below the Zoroaster Brahma Saddle, but it may be a little easier over to the north nearer Hattan Butte. I don't think much of Ellis' suggestion that the Redwall should go easily at the base of Jones Point. I could see what Chuck Johnson meant about the ridge out to Sumner Point being like a knife blade for width. I'll probably want to crawl for quite a distance here. I couldn't see how Chuck came up the Redwall without using the ravine. Another oversight was that I didn't use any chance to see how the Redwall looks down the ravine to the north opposite the place where we come up from the Clear Creek Trail (OK).

One shot should show the west side of Johnson Point. This should be climbable. The ravine paralleling Haunted Canyon on the Buddha Temple side looks like a maybe (OK). The north slope at the east side of Osiris through the top of the Supai looks much easier than the Supai along the west of Brahma. I would like to attempt this. The highest part of the Coconino on the southwest side of Shiva may be tough. I could see that the slope is easy to this height. I snapped two more views of Stanton's ascent below Ra and also of his descent area. We were much too high to try duplicating his pictures toward Dragon Head and also the shot to the southwest.

The river was really roaring through Crystal Rapid and I would agree that it is a major, worse than Hermit. I finished 36 shots and took a few on my second roll including one of Pattie Butte. At this late point, I began to feel airsick.

Sierra Club trip and Sumner Butte
[May 27, 1967 to May 29, 1967]

Jerry Foote notified me about the plans and schedule, so I went down to camp at Bright Angel Campground and visit him. He introduced me to several couples. I got acquainted with the Reznicks, the Ellinwoods, and the Northhooks. Dave Northhook has had a lot of mountain experience including climbing the Grand Teton. Mrs. Reznick is Mirian Pederson's sister. I had heard a lot about the devastation caused by the freak flood last December, but the actuality was even stranger than my mental image. It seemed freakish that the water kept to a narrow channel beside the main buildings of the ranch but out through the mule pasture. Some of the former rock wall is still standing on what was an island during the flood while the corral is a mess of boulders. Hardly any work has been done yet to put the trail back up beneath the exposed pipeline. Wooden bridges get the walker across the creek on his way to the ranch. They are so near the water that any summer thunderstorm should take them down into the river. The weather was abnormally threatening for this time of year, and on Sunday morning at 5:15 I was awakened by a little sprinkle. I moved up to the porch by the swimming pool but I didn't get back to sleep. While I was eating breakfast, Allyn Cureton came along. Two weeks ago I had told him I wanted to climb Sumner on this day.

As we went up the wash leading to the ravine at the beginning of the promontory to Sumner, we looked at the route up to the lowest part of the ridge that Chuck Johnson had used. I couldn't see what he had done to get up one ledge. Later when we were nearly to the main part of Sumner, I believe I saw a crack that he must have chimneyed up. I wish now that we had tried it. I knew what we would be up against in the ravine at the head of the wash, and I figured that if he could go along the crest of the ridge leading over to Sumner, we should be able to also. Going up the ravine with a pack, containing my lunch and a gallon of water mostly, was harder than I had found it three years ago, but we made it with no real hesitation. The bypass to the east of the vertical fall in the bed seemed a bit steeper than I had remembered it. We noted a couple of helpful cairns, probably built by Doc Ellis on his April 16th investigation of the route. It took us abut two and one half hours to go from the ranch to the top of the Redwall by this route.

From below I had thought that there should be more gentle bypasses for the drops we could see in the ridge, but we learned that going right along the top was the only way. In a number of places we had to face in and descend by hand and toeholds. However, the most unusual part of this route was the extreme sharpness of the ridge. Allyn trusted his sense of balance much more than I and kept to his feet, but at a number of places I did a crab walk or used hands and feet for yards at a time. A few times I sat down straddling the edge and inched my way forward. At one place I would have turned back if I had been alone.

We saw a prominent cairn near the lowest place along the ridge and wondered whether this marked the top of the direct route up from the east. There was no cairn on the highest part of the butte, but the one at the edge in view of Phantom Ranch was at least two feet high and just as wide.

After lunch at our packs just above the ascent ravine, we tried going down to the north. It was easy to get down over 200 feet, but then there was a sheer cliff about 100 feet, and there was no way to go along any ledge to either side.

Sunday evening I talked to the group about my experiences in the canyon and then had quite a visit with the ranger, Ken Kulick. He seems more eager to learn his way through the back country than anyone else for quite a time.

Kirby Trail and the upper Cataract Canyon
[June 1, 1967]

I had marked the Bachathatooiva Trail, which must be the same as the Kirby Trail, on my Williams Quad map, but aside from showing that one should go west through Anita, it was not very helpful. I followed the main road, what must have been northwest, until it ended at a ranch called The Well because of the deep well with a timber derrick still in place. The Lathams manage the area for the Babbitts who own the land on both sides of Cataract Canyon although the Indians have the bottom as an extension of their reservation. It is 19 miles from the highway to the well.

I didn't understand Mrs. Latham's directions very well and turned through a gate about two miles south of their ranch. This road ended at a metal tank a mile or so to the northwest. After continuing on foot for a half hour, I decided that this would get me nowhere and returned to The Well. Mr. Latham was now at home and he drew me a good sketch of the route to the head of the Kirby Trail. You continue past the gate I had entered and after veering to the east the road swings west to another gate. Beyond you continue along a ridge to a fork where the route is to the left down to a metal storage tank and some feeder troughs. Here the track is obliterated but you go straight on through and find the wheel tracks again. Soon the tracks turn north and in a mile from the feed lot, you come to an east west track. This is a T turn for cars, but cow paths continue north. I overshot this turn a few yards before heading west. There are no more forks and in three and one half miles one reaches the trailhead with a rough cabin. The limestone is broken by earth movements and a corral has been built using one of the pits.

A peculiar feature of this trail is the rather obscure beginning compared to the elaborate work of trail building for the upper third down into the 1000 foot canyon. One might not be sure he is starting correctly until he comes to the snake rail fence made of railroad ties, but just below the fence the trail has been built five feet wide with an unusually gradual grade for the switchbacks and a surface that seems to have been graveled over the finish with a rake. At several places short railroad rails have been used to bolster the edge and the size of the blocks used in the retaining walls is startling. Then suddenly the costly construction ceases and the trail is what one would expect, a maze of tracks formed by wild horses and deer down the talus that covers the Toroweap and Coconino. The bottom is in the Hermit Shale.

As I looked back up the trail, my eye was caught by a natural bridge in the ravine just north of the trail. There was another, likewise up near the rim, on the west side of the canyon something like an hour's walk south along the bed. On my way back paralleling the rim I saw a big overhang on the west side with an indication of a pit behind the ceiling, but I couldn't be sure of this. At the lower end of the second ravine on the east side south of the Kirby Trail, I found another small natural bridge piercing the rim. They ought to call the whole canyon Havasu instead of Cataract for the upper end, but if one had to choose a different name for the upper end, Bridge Canyon might be appropriate.

Walking is easier along the horse trails up away from the bed of the canyon. Progress was fairly steady although it took me two hours to get above the Hermit. Around a mile from the trail, I passed a short side canyon from the west, more like an indentation with vertical walls.

Mrs. Latham had said that the spring which was formerly near the bottom of the trail is now dry (no, it flows). I looked for it and the best prospect I could see was a spot of dense green at the top of the Hermit down canyon on the west side. I intended to inspect it carefully on my return in the afternoon, but I didn't come back that way.

When I had been walking up canyon for two hours, the appearance changed abruptly as the bed entered the Coconino Sandstone. It is much narrower and great blocks impede the way.

Furthermore, there is a great deal of brush to break through. Progress is slower, but the route is more interesting. There are still small clearings where one can walk without difficulty, however. The grade is steeper and it took me only one hour and 45 minutes of this slower walking to get to the top of the Coconino. It had rained two days before, and I was watching to see how much water would be left. There was none in the Hermit, but about 20 minutes before I reached the top of the Coconino, I found a pool next to the west wall. Right at the top of the Coconino there were numerous deep pools. The top 30 feet of the Coconino exhibits a fall in the bedrock that at first sight seemed to be a real obstacle. I could have gone back and got up, but I was able to scramble up by some ledges on the east side.

The bed through the Toroweap and Kaibab is similar, not quite so narrow but still with big rockfalls in the way and much brush. There were a few shallow waterholes. It took me one hour and 25 minutes to come past the vertical limestone walls to the place where it is an easy scramble down the broken slope to the bottom. This change is true for both sides. I had begun watching for possible exits. The only place I felt sure I could climb out was to the east only one quarter mile from the Kirby Trail. There was a grass covered talus from the west wall that would take one two thirds of the way to the top. Then it might be possible to go north along the level and enter a side canyon and get up to the rim. This looked probable but not sure from the east rim as I went back to the car.

Just before I reached the walk up to the rim, I investigated a cave in the east wall. It had a smoke blackened ceiling and a juniper log cut with a steel axe lay on the floor. About a mile north of the exit from the canyon, I noted a couple of pieces of Indian pottery, black on white design, about 100 yards from the rim. This was not far from another ranch with a sheet metal barn and a house painted a weather beaten green.

I had thought that along the rim I would be able to get back to the car in something like three hours instead of the five plus it had taken me along the bottom, but it came out more like four hours. There were so many ravines to cross. I would have been easier if I had stayed well away from the rim, but I wanted to see into the canyon at intervals.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the trek was the very chilly weather for the first of June. Early in the day, I was wishing I had some gloves and when I ate lunch, I had to put on a jacket and still move from the shade into the sun. Birds were singing and flowers were blooming. One wonders how it happens that some places become so famous as beauty spots while others are virtually unknown. Thousands make the pilgrimage to Canyon de Chelly for one who goes to upper Havasu Canyon or to Spencer and Meriwitica. Arizona Highways should do something about this state of affairs. Still maybe it is a good thing to keep a few places off the beaten track. A note about ecology might be in order. There were many walnut trees in the narrows of the Coconino and higher. I saw one big deer in the bottom and thirteen along the rim, the biggest group having six. There is apparently not enough hunting on this private range land. The deer had stripped the big cliff rose shrubs as high as they could stand and had bitten through some of the slender strands.

Shinumo Amphitheater
[June 5, 1967 to June 8, 1967]

My primary aim was to complete the traverse from Crystal Creek to Shinumo and in the process check the possibility of a route down the Redwall on the south side of Flint about two miles from the Tuna Flint Saddle. At headquarters they told me that not only was the Point Sublime road closed but the fire road west through the basin was also impassable. The scenic drive to Point Imperial and Cape Royal was also closed, so projects in that direction were impossible or rather better left until access would be more direct. That left me thinking of Cogswell Butte and the descent at the mouth of Crazy Jug Canyon into Tapeats. While I was driving over there I saw signs leading to Quaking Aspen Canyon and finally Fire Point. I drove back a couple of miles and started walking south. I crossed Grass Canyon and Castle Canyon and a couple of tributaries and was able to reach the Swamp Point Road in 35 minutes. In 40 more I was on the point starting down. After 20 minutes down to the saddle, I could see that the view towards Dox Castle was what Moran (Moran's painting photographed in Stone's Canyon Country) was looking at when he painted his famous picture, but I know I didn't have the right elevati

Harvey Butchart’s Hiking Log, Volume 2 August 6, 1964 - September 20, 1969

Harvey Butchart’s Hiking Log, Volume 2
August 6, 1964 - September 20, 1969