New green on the trees, birds claiming territory and the air thick with moisture, the sky thick with haze. We left Oklahoma on May15, driving west into New Mexico. The trees fall away, leaving kneehigh sagebrush, offering just enough shade for a jackrabbit. The horizon unrolls before us like a magic carpet to a foreign land.
Chaco canyon
Thirty miles northwest of Albuquerque we turn south onto a dirt road running across the high desert. The Ancient Ones, the Anasazi, made this desolate land the center of their vast culture.
Over a thousand years ago people came from hundreds of miles to gather here. The people are gone. They took with them the reasons that they choose this place and what it meant to them.
From the little that remains we know that they had an incredible civilization. They studied astronomy, and built buildings and even cities to align with the solstice. They built a system of roads, straight as an arrow for hundreds of miles, many of which can still be seen in satellite photos. Their architecture and jewelry excelled. We do know that they had a distributed system of agriculture including aqueducts and storage ponds. We know that they gathered timbers from up to 60 miles to the north and built four cities in the canyon, as well as several outlying villages.
Of course many things have been lost, and we can only wonder what it may have been like raising a family in their time; the smell of maize cooking on the pinion fire and the sounds of children playing in the creek, on the ladders and along the cliffs.
Lake Powell
Leaned up against the Water Pocket Fold, Lake Powell is like a deep green mirage in a world of blistering rock. The Colorado River dug this canyon through an uplift of sedimentary rock, taking millennia. For the time, the water pools, like a trapped animal, rimmed by imported salt cedar.
The lake was built to power the bright lights and to make possible the fountains and golf courses of Las Vegas. It has also brought thousands of boaters to the desert. But its primary purpose is to store this lands most valuable commodity.
Many things were lost when the lake filled. The river gorge and its many tributaries were a maze of fantastic, hidden places - a very special landscape. The lake looses an enormous volume (approx. 400,000 acre feet per year) of water through evaporation into the dry desert air (water rights along the Colorado River squeeze every drop out of the basin, so that the river's delta, in Baja California, is a dry wash, not the verdant marsh land described by Aldo Leopold in 1934). Sad to is the lake’s effect on the riverine and riparian habitats downstream which have been totally displaced. The natural ecosystem, based on warm muddy water and seasonal floods has been replaced with a steady flow of cold, clear water. Fish and plant species throughout Grand Canyon National Park have been completely replaced with a foreign ecosystem.
In recent years, an extended drought has drawn the lake level down. The exposed canyon walls show ancient pictographs that, ironically, would have put the lake in violation of the Antiquities Act, had they been cataloged before its creation.
As long as the water remains, there will be houseboats and jet skis and there will be expensive trash floating up on the slick rock. Las Vegas will build more 5000 room casinos and desert golf courses - because they can.
Cottonwood creek narrows
Cottonwood Creek has cut a gash in the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau before it lends its waters to Paria Creek, which flows into the Colorado River. The canyon through the Navaho sandstone is nearly 200 feet deep and frequently is less than 20 feet wide. It's a dangerous place during the summer thunderstorm season, when rain miles away can send of wall of mud and rocks down the canyon without warning.
Today we are fortunate. Morning light ricochets off the high walls, but the bottom of the canyon is still imbued with deep, cool shade. There hasn't been rain for days, maybe months. The canyon floor is dry and soft, with sand often 3 inches deep, making us work for every step.
The shear walls show the signs of turbulent water, abrasive silt scouring away at the rock. Pockets here and there, layer on stratified layer cut away in swirls and eddies. Beautiful forms, elegant lines, the master's hand has been at work. A place of silent beauty - a place of crushing violence - can they be the same? - can they be different?
Soon the canyon's walls open into a broad wash. The creek meanders its way down the arroyo, with a fringe of cottonwood trees, forming a ribbon of green across the searing ground.
Such was my brief trip through this barren, fragile, commodified, pristine, stark, quiet, hard, magic land.
