Artists In Jars

You've passed the threshold. So, then you're here. That's weird.

I don't see you. Well,

stay as long as you like. You'll find an assortment of baubles below. Pick 1. Or all. Or just enjoy the aesthetic. Your traffic brings more people. That's analytics, sorry, not appropriate. I'm not that often enough. What are you? Into, i mean.

Mechs? See the jar with D P in it? Stick something in the jar. Enough somethings in the jar, I see D P make us mechs. The mechs appear in a game. We open the game. We right click the mech. We hit "save as…". We name the mech. We have a mech.

This repeats. We call this process. Bugs. yes, bugs. 3D-Printed Infinity Bubble Homes. yes, of c. List better seen yourself. Go down. Hit the "way down" key. Not saying talking to a grey box on a monitor in the woods by an ocean impossible to scale for scope is unmanageably intumescent. Just, a bit of spoilering-like. For, you know, we of us who read every word as if they're pikes in a rock wall we scale carefully down, for else fall with the falling of a bottomless pit in on-and-on. Sky Ocean's jar: over there if you, uhh, 'need' that last sentence to have art for it made. I'll be

here, if you need me. Click the meatballs—or hold cntl—hit "search in browser"—or hit f—make the word "hymn" appear on the screen. You'll find me. We remember the word. We enjoy the shelf.

NATIVE HERITAGE
Culture & Memory
Anglo settlers called the Waterpocket Fold “Capitol Reef” because they saw
this wall of red cliffs as a barricade to travel, akin to an ocean reef. Native
peoples saw the Fold as home — not an obstacle but a grid of easy pathways
created by permanent streams that slice through these same cliffs.
Archaeologists do their best to understand and analyze artifacts and to
classify these Native peoples in recognizable traditions. These scientists place
Capitol Reef on the frontier between Great Basin and Southwest cultures.
The Fremont people who lived along the Waterpocket Fold in late prehis-
toric times bump up here against the better-­known Ancestral Puebloans, the
Anasazi, who mostly lived in canyon country to the south. (Since Anasazi
means “enemy ancestors” in Navajo, scientists now avoid using the term, in
deference to contemporary Pueblo people.)
A heads-­up on terms that may be unfamiliar: the Archaic Period in the
Southwest follows the Paleoindian Period (the first people in North Amer-
ica) and ends with the adoption of agriculture (in the north) and pottery (in
the south). Dates for the Archaic vary, beginning around  BC and ending
as late as the first few centuries AD. The Formative Period is the archaeolo-
gist’s designation for the time of the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans — the
centuries of full-­blown agriculture and village life that followed the Archaic.
Writer Rose Houk introduces us to the Fremont, named by archaeologist
Noel Morss for the Fremont River at Capitol Reef (the river itself named for
explorer John Charles Fremont, who crossed the stream near its headwaters
in ). Archaeologist Steven Simms probes deeper into the “mystery” and
diversity of Fremont people.
To bring to life these long-­ago times, writers emphasize people over cul-
ture. As David Madsen, former Utah state archaeologist, wrote in Exploring
the Fremont in :

Part II: Native Heritage
Fremont Indian petroglyphs, Fremont River canyon, .
During the fifteen hundred years that the Fremont can be distin-
guished, they produced an archaeological record as rich, yet as enig-
matic, as any in the world. The record of how they lived, reacted and
responded to the changing world around them, is a mirror of our-
selves: all peoples at all times and in all places. It is a record of human
behavior. It is a record that is difficult to interpret and difficult to
understand. But if we can clarify who and what the Fremont were,
we will better understand how and why we act as we do, and what
it means to be human in arid country. By exploring the Fremont, we
explore ourselves as a people intrinsically tied to these desert lands.
In the s, National Park Service anthropologist Rosemary Sucec inter-
viewed contemporary Indian people from tribes who used the Waterpocket
Fold — the Hopi, Zuni, Southern Paiute, Ute, and Navajo. The stories they tellPart II: Native Heritage

root each culture in a homeland that includes Capitol Reef National Park.
Sucec’s work marks a new recognition of inclusivity and collaboration by
park managers.
These tribal connections to Capitol Reef country continue. Small com-
munities of Southern Paiute people still live west of the park in Koosharem
and Joseph and tell stories of their grandparents’ use of the canyons of the
Waterpocket Fold.
We don’t have to reach back centuries in either Native or non-­Native
memory to touch the last Ute/Paiute Sun Dance in the Capitol Reef area,
held at Fish Lake, source of the Fremont River, in . Rancher Dee Hatch
of Bicknell was ten years old that year. Seventy years later, in a  interview
with writer and backcountry authority Steve Allen, Hatch remembered wit-
nessing this last Sun Dance, the most important spiritual ceremony (even
without the chest-­piercing practiced by Plains tribes) in the Ute tradition.
The Native people who led the dance at Fish Lake were the same people who
claimed Capitol Reef as traditional territory, as sacred ground:
All the Indians in Utah had an invitation, I think. They had a place
out by Bowery Creek, up in the trees in the quaking aspen. They had a
clearing up there, and that’s the first I’d seen Indians wear braids. We
stayed on into the night after dark, and they built this fire and had a
nice clearing in the trees and they started dancin’ and singin’ and all
gathered around this campfire and then here come the contestants
and they come out of the trees there somewhere and started dancin’.
And they had this pole in the middle of the clearing and they’d dance
up and back, up and back, and they had feathers on top of the pole
and they had a whistle in their mouths, and they were stripped down
to the waist, these young men. We noticed with all interest, and in
later years, I didn’t think much of it. But then I found out that was
the last time they ever had a Sun Dance.
In the final piece in “Native Heritage,” historian Robert McPherson
recounts the odyssey of Capitol Reef’s most famous artifacts, the Pectol
shields, which found their way home to the Navajo on a winding path that
mirrors the journeys of Native people themselves. This repatriation remains
the pivotal gesture of respect toward Native culture at Capitol Reef.Rock art, Fish Creek Cove, . Archaeologist Noel Morss visited these
spectacular pictographs and petroglyphs in , and the National Park
Service included this Fremont living site near Torrey in their  proposal
for a Capitol Reef National Monument. Vandals had already dug the site and
defaced the cliff, and so officials chose not to grant monument status to Fish
Creek Cove when finalizing the  boundaries.
DWELLERS OF THE RAINBOW ()
Rose Houk
Flagstaff, Arizona, writer Rose Houk came to the Southwest to work as a park
naturalist at Grand Canyon National Park. She has been writing for national
park natural history associations for more than thirty years, including two books
about Capitol Reef (both excerpted in the reader; also see Chapter ). Her goal:
“to instill curiosity and affection for the natural and cultural world we all share,
and thus inspire its protection.”
It is a sultry July day, and as usual the desert is empty. We have followed a
creek downstream, crossing and recrossing in detours to examine promising
sandstone walls burnished coppery black by desert varnish.
At one point the broad streambed narrows, cutting deep, sinuous swirls
into pink rock. Water tumbles playfully through this miniature gorge, in-
viting us to linger. I walk over to the north wall of the canyon, and as I
approach, the sound of flowing water seems to be coming from within the
rock. An eerie sound. I walk closer, then back away, and the sound changes.
I realize that I am hearing the echo of the stream behind me.
And just in front of me, on the face of the canyon wall at eye level, are
etched four simple V-­shaped figures, their outlines faint from weathering.
These figures weren’t here by accident; someone else, years ago, also thought
this a special place. Whoever had drawn them was marking this place. My
imagination soared. Would these have been images of spirits? Water spirits
perhaps? In a dry desert such as this, the magical sound of running water
would have been worth memorializing.

Dwellers of the Rainbow
Bedrock metates, Fremont Culture living site, Pleasant Creek, .
In that canyon of imaginings, we had been treated to one of the finest
outdoor galleries in the world. This drainage and other perennial streams in
Capitol Reef National Park offer outstanding examples of Indian rock art,
much of it executed by people known to archeologists as the Fremont. They
lived here about a thousand years ago, then disappeared. Their beginnings,
here in this remote corner of the American Southwest, are as uncertain as
their end. But they left behind clues about their culture that we can partially
decipher and haltingly reconstruct.
The Fremont were named for the Fremont River that flows through
the northern section of Capitol Reef, an especially scenic part of the
-­mile-long swell of rock called the Waterpocket Fold. Some consider
this area the heartland of the Fremont people, for here they were named and
defined as a major prehistoric culture with an identity all its own.
Bits and pieces of the Fremont puzzle have been put in place over the
past fifty years, revealing a people who lived intimately with their environ-
ment. To survive they had to be highly mobile, but they did settle down long
enough each year to plant and harvest crops of corn, beans, and squash. TheRose Houk

Fremont lived in caves or small, unassuming houses, sometimes in villages;
they did not build elaborate cliff dwellings or pueblos like their contempo-
raries to the south. Baskets and pots, tools and weapons, and occasionally
clothing are the principal material remains that tell us something of their
everyday lives.
Aside from their fantastic rock art, the Fremont are by some standards
an “unglamorous” people. Their strong suit, however, was knowing how
to live in the valleys, deserts, and mountains of the Capitol Reef area. They
had to locate the best spots for farming on the stream bottoms, and know
when to journey to the uplands to gather pine nuts. They would have discov-
ered which rockshelters and overhangs stayed dry and warm in winter, and
where they might find a dependable spring or a small pothole of residual
water during the driest times of the years. By trial and error, they learned
hundreds of plants and their uses for food, fiber, and medicine. In the in-
credibly ­rugged environment, they had to hone their instincts to outwit prey
animals, their only source of meat. That they survived here for more than
eight centuries attests to their flexibility, mobility, and ingenuity.
It was up to an easterner, unaccustomed to the desert, to first determine
that Capitol Reef held evidence of a distinctive culture that had been largely
unknown to archeologists. What he and others have found in the last half
century now forms the basis for our knowledge of the Fremont Culture.
“Discovery”
Noel Morss created a quandary for future archeologists by defining the Fre-
mont Culture. They now talk about “the Fremont problem” — the problem
being that the word “Fremont” means different things to different people.
The Fremont identity crisis continues to stimulate unending debate among
the experts.
When Morss came to Capitol Reef in the summers of  and  he
could not have known what his discoveries would later mean. He was part of
the Claflin-­Emerson expedition, named for Mr. and Mrs. William H. ­Claflin
and Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Emerson, who donated money to Harvard Uni-
versity’s Peabody Museum for the expedition.
Using the towns of Escalante, Green River, and Moab as jumping off
points, Morss and fellow researchers set out to explore the huge, empty
Dwellers of the Rainbow
area between the Uinta Mountains on the north and the Colorado River
on the south.
They worked in country that is still some of the most remote and in­
accessible in the nation. They crossed rivers by ferry because there were no
bridges at the time, pulled their horses out of quicksand, scrambled up steep
canyon walls, and dug under the searing summer sun. When they could use
automobiles, they encountered bad roads that were usually impassable in
wet weather. Local residents more familiar with the region and its rigors
acted as guides, among them David Rust, known best for his efforts at start-
ing Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Morss, a lawyer-­turned-archeologist, spent most of his time in the Fre-
mont River drainage around Torrey and Fruita, Utah, including the major
tributaries of Oak and Pleasant creeks. What he found during the two sum-
mers here revealed, in his words, “an unexpected and interesting situation.”
He had expected to encounter the same kinds of remains as had earlier
archeologists working in nearby areas.
Instead, “quite to the contrary, the Fremont drainage proved to be the
seat of a distinctive culture.” In his landmark monograph published in ,
The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah, Noel Morss first recognized
and defined the Fremont Culture. He described it thus:
This culture was characterized by cave sites with a slab cist archi-
tecture . . . by a distinctive unpainted black or gray pottery; by the
exclusive use of a unique type of moccasin; by a cult of unbaked clay
figurines ...[and] by abundant pictographs of distinctive types.
Though these people had obviously been influenced by the Anasazi —
pueblo builders living to the south, east and west — the Fremont were unique
in the characteristics Morss noted.
A great many artifacts had already been removed by the time Morss and
other archeologists came on the scene. In  a man named Don Maguire
of Ogden, Utah, was commissioned to collect archeological material for
Utah’s exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair in . Along with a Salt Lake
City man, he dug a “quantity of fine objects,” including a “mummy,” from
Capitol Reef, items which did go on display at the exposition, according to
early park superintendent Charles Kelly.Rose Houk

Three roaming French archeologists visited the area, scratching their
names and the date “” on a cliff along the Fremont River. The trio ap-
parently excavated four or five small rooms, but left no other information.
As settlers moved into the Torrey area in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the nonscientific excavating continued. Hide shields,
buckskin garments, necklaces, and other choice artifacts could be viewed in
“­museums” in the homes of local residents.
But it was Noel Morss, and the dauntless Claflin-­Emerson Expedition,
who finally began to put these finds into a context that had some meaning.
As an indirect result of their work, in August  President Franklin D.
Roosevelt set aside Capitol Reef National Monument for its “objects of
geologic and scientific interest.”. . .
Dressing up
The Fremont were known by their footwear. They made a moccasin so dis-
tinctive that its presence alone says “the Fremont were here.”
The moccasin’s method of construction makes it unique and original
to the Fremont. Three pieces of hide were cut from the forelegs of a deer or
antelope. The dewclaws — the claws of vestigial toes — were left on, possibly
to function as hobnails. In making the Fremont moccasin, a broad sole was
cut in the shape of a foot and two upper pieces were attached to it. These
pieces, stitched on with sinew along the sides and in the front of the mocca-
sin, extended and overlapped at the back of the foot. Buckskin or dogbane
ties tightened the shoe on the foot.
Noel Morss found such moccasins in Capitol Reef. The “informality in
their manufacture” made each pair at first appear to be different. But on
closer study, he said, “they turn out to conform fairly closely to one plan.”
He found no trace of fiber sandals like those commonly worn by contempo-
raries of the Fremont. Among the moccasins were some with the fur still on
the hide, with grass and mud insoles to soften and warm the inside. Morss
hypothesized that the use of hide was a response to the cold climate in which
the Fremont lived. Winter temperatures in Capitol Reef can indeed make
even the toes of the well-­booted feel like brittle china.
Moccasins were valued possessions to the Fremont; at least they must
have been hard to come by, for many were found patched multiple times.
Dwellers of the Rainbow
Before they learned to leave the excavating to archaeologists, Torrey residents
Ephraim Pectol and Charles Lee collected Fremont artifacts in the canyons sur-
rounding Capitol Reef in the s. Lee collected this ⁄-inch-long cradleboard
with its carefully nested miniature Fremont figurine. This remarkable object now
resides in the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum, Price, Utah.
Photograph by François Gohier.
Here was a suitable job for a long winter’s evening, seated by the fire under
a cozy overhang, listening to the old folks tell their timeless stories....
A well-­dressed Fremont man or woman was bedecked with ornaments —
tubes, pendants, and rings made of bone, teeth, shell, and pottery. The bone
pieces are the long bones of small mammals and birds, and have been pol-
ished to a sheen. Stone such as jet from the nearby Henry Mountains orRose Houk

turquoise obtained through trade perhaps would have been saved for the
finest jewelry. Flicker and meadowlark feathers made handsome headdresses
and bands, though only a few have ever been found.
The only fashion clues we have other than these artifacts come from
Fremont figurines and rock art. If these in fact indicate everyday dress rather
than ceremonial or mythical garb, it appears that women may have worn
“aprons” and the men breechcloths. The figurines and the human forms
drawn on rock also wear necklaces and sport a variety of head adornments.
Indeed, Fremont rock art may tell us a great deal about the people’s lives. As
one pundit put it, the Fremont, it seems, abided by the dictum “Leave only
moccasin prints, take only pictographs.”
FREMONT PLACES, FREMONT LIFE,
FREMONT PLACE ()
Steven R. Simms
Archaeologist Steven Simms taught at Utah State University for thirty years. In
addition to his scholarly research, he’s written popular books about the prehistory
of the American Desert West, including Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin
and Colorado Plateau ( from which this excerpt comes) and Traces of Fremont:
Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah, with photographer François Gohier. He
recently rediscovered a .-­mile irrigation system shown to Noel Morss on the slopes
of Boulder Mountain in . With modern science, Simms can date these canals,
possibly built by the Fremont and used in surprisingly recent times, –,
suggesting continuity with the historic tribes of the Southwest.
The Fremont period was a sea change. The ancient heritage of the Archaic
forager societies became enmeshed in continental upheaval that brought
immigrant farmers and a new way of life to the West. The Fremont was a
culture — there were some broad, unifying themes in the rock art, ceramic
design, basketry, architecture, and the use of space. But the landscape was
large, and there was surely a mosaic of ethnic groups, tribal enclaves, linguis-
tic variation, and shades of difference in lifestyle.
The earliest Fremont landscape, perhaps  BC, was a frontier inhabited
by Late Archaic foragers and a few explorers from the Southwest. Others
followed, and by AD  there was a smattering of farming outposts in a
wilderness of foragers. After AD , the landscape became a sea of farmers.
People gathered into villages, hamlets, and farmsteads as they had never
Steven R. Simms

done before. In the best watered areas there were true villages of a dozen to
several dozen homes. But most Fremont villages were small affairs. Archae-
ologists call the small Fremont farmsteads “rancherias”; often they consisted
only of a single residential structure, but more often there were a few homes
clustered together. Among the homes were outdoor activity areas, and prob-
ably ramadas for shade. There were racks for hanging things, caches of gear,
piles of raw materials, and the refuse dumps that humans everywhere create.
Embedded in some of the villages were communal storage structures made
of adobe. In other cases storage was kept inside the houses and was hence
less public. In still other intriguing instances, storage was remote from the
residences and evidently hidden in cliffs for defense.
The primary Fremont dwelling was the pithouse. Basement-­like struc-
tures, pithouses were capacious, functional, warm in the winter, and cool
in the summer. Pithouses were excavated into the ground from a few centi­
meters to over a meter deep. A log and pole roof supported by vertical
posts (a four-­square pattern is common) extended the structure well above
the ground. When finished with various arrangements of smaller wooden
roofing material and finally an earthen seal, pithouses looked like low
mounds, or truncated pyramids, with a flat roof that provided a convenient
and elevated outdoor living space. Pithouses had central heating, places
for storage, and a ventilation system. Shallow, cheap-­to-build pithouses
had been employed in some parts of the Basin-­Plateau for the last ,
years, but the extra settling that came with farming brought them into
widespread use and escalated the investment made in pithouses during
Fremont times....
Despite the number of pithouses often found at Fremont sites, only a
few were used at one time. This is true of virtually all Fremont village sites,
and we should reject the temptation to see these villages as large just be-
cause the count of pithouses runs into the dozens or even hundreds. There
were indeed large villages that were home to hundreds of people, but the
images conjured by the terms “hamlet” or “rancheria” are a far more accurate
description of life for the vast number of Fremont people scattered across
the region. . ..
The Fremont were settled, but they were also on the move. A cycle of
habitation, abandonment, and relocation structured life and place. This was
Fremont Places
Fremont Indian petroglyph of bighorn sheep, Pleasant Creek, .
a repetition that played out over the lives of individuals, as well as a pattern
expressed over centuries and hence generations of people....
The lifespan of an individual pithouse was only a few years, and struc-
tures that survived more than a decade were rare. People returned and place
was a magnet across generations even as particular places went unused for
a time. . . .
Fremont rock art reflects the extensiveness of their presence across the
region. A distinctive ensemble of anthropomorphic figures, wavy lines,
spirals, dots, as well as naturalistic and stylized animals seems to occur in
every canyon in the region. The amount of Fremont rock art dwarfs any-
thing from the eons of the Archaic. Fremont rock art exhibits regional styles,
but there are common motifs and a unifying manner of execution. Fremont
rock art exemplifies the notion that a land once filled with foragers now
bristled with enclaves of farmers. . . .Steven R. Simms

The desert and the sown
The centuries between AD  and  saw a dramatic rise in population
size, with the precise timing depending on location. Many now rural areas
such as Castle Valley, the Sevier Valley, and Parowan Valley were more widely
populated than the same areas are today. The Wasatch Front may well have
been the most populous part of Utah, just as it is today. Archaeologists have
a dual personality when it comes to the Fremont. On the one hand, we have
long known they were farmers. When Noel Morss prospected along the
Fremont River near the towns of Loa and Torrey in the s, local farmers
showed him the ancient Indian irrigation ditches. Nearly every Utah town
founded by Mormon settlers between Brigham City and Cedar City is built
on top of Fremont homes and fields, because both peoples chose the best
places to farm with the least effort.
On the other hand, archaeologists realized the Fremont were not as
married to farming as were the Anasazi of the Southwest. The Fremont were
seen as a “northern periphery” relegated to part-­time hunting and gathering
by the harsh environment of the high plateaus. This became the stereotype
of the Fremont... .
Perhaps Fremont life was more dynamic than we thought. Is it possible
that someone might be born in the desert as a forager, grow up there, and
as a young adult find himself marrying into a village and eating maize for
the rest of his life? Or perhaps after a few poor years of farming a village
might break up, with some families being sent to live with relatives where
people relied on a mix of farmed and wild foods. Archaeologists have long
wondered about these things, and it began to look as though the scale were
tipping toward a dynamic between the desert and the sown....
The DNA and activity patterns show that some of the differences ar-
chaeologists saw were reflections of the life history of individuals, rather
than categorical differences between people who lived one way or another
all their lives. It is the same story of unity as told by the distinctive tradition
of Fremont basketry — they were all of a cloth. The Fremont cultural tradi-
tion was a tapestry of local ethnicity and variations in ways of life woven
together by the social connections that came from the flow of people across
the landscape.
Fremont Places
Archaeologists see much more than a simple story of foragers settling
down to become farmers. The farming life indeed reduced residential mo-
bility as long as people kept farming in a particular place. But excavations
of Fremont sites show that most were not occupied long before being aban-
doned. Absences were sometimes brief, perhaps only a few years, before
people returned. . . . [And Rosemary Sucec learned in her interviews with the
Hopi that they never abandon places. She told me, “Their cosmologies directed
them to leave their ‘footprints.’ They come back to those places on pilgrimage, sing
and do ceremonies related to their stopping places. Any ancestors who died there,
their spirits still remain.” ]
To modern ears, the term “abandonment” sounds like a failure to prog-
ress, but perhaps this is the wrong perspective. Abandonment was part of
their success. It was part of a sense of place characterized by rhythmic tempo
anchored to the land. Fremont farmers flowed over places as the patchwork
quilt of arable land changed year to year in response to myriad cues. It might
have been the depth of mountain snowpack and consequently the spring
and summer runoff. Or it might have been minor differences in elevation,
where only  meters mattered. A plot might fail or succeed, depending
on whether the first frost arrived in August or September. Even the annual
exposure of land to sun and shade changed. In some years, a sunny southern
exposure might have fried the fields while a nearby northern aspect at the
base of a slope leaking moisture might have saved it. In other years it could
have been the reverse.
Where did people go when they abandoned places? The first choice
was to move to other plots controlled by their family, lineage and alliances
among communities. A portfolio of fields in a variety of small settings
hedged risk. Over decades, the plots of arable land might move up and
down slope as the climate changed. During drought, only the best places
might produce, and as population grew, previously unexploited plots could
be added. But this approach worked only until the th and th centuries,
when all the arable land was used. The social fabric mediated a dynamic
between the desert and the sown, the inhabited and the abandoned, and the
tempo of life and place.
FULFILLING DESTINIES, SUSTAINING LIVES ()
Rosemary Sucec
Rosemary Sucec is one of twenty cultural anthropologists who work for the Na-
tional Park Service. Based at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, she oversees
all cultural resources associated with the canyons along the Colorado River–Lake
Powell corridor. Sucec documented American Indian histories and resource uses
at Capitol Reef through interviews and archival research to create Fulfilling Des-
tinies, Sustaining Lives: The Landscape of the Waterpocket Fold, our most
complete source for understanding Native relationships with the park landscape.
While a study of archeology at the park can relay ecological understandings
of how native peoples survived in and adapted to the environment, con-
sultation with associated tribes opens up worlds of meaning that humans
through time invest in a landscape. . . . Too often, Native Americans have
been portrayed as merely part of archeology and history — if not otherwise
omitted from a presence — and rarely as active players whose heritage pres-
ervation is a major responsibility of national park operations.
For example, through consultation with the Pueblo of Zuni, we learned
about an epic saga of emergence and millennia-­long migrations. The mi-
grations began when their ancestors were hunters and gatherers as early as
the Paleoindian and into the Archaic period. One of the Zuni medicine
societies headed north potentially into Utah and the Capitol Reef environ-
ment. In so doing, ancestors blazed trails and created camping sites that
became t ­ oday’s archeological sites. Members of this society used plants,
Fremont Indian petroglyph, Hickman Bridge Trail, .Rosemary Sucec

animals, and m
­ inerals to aid them in survival. They scribed images on rocks
as maps and for other purposes.
When the Zuni consultants came to Capitol Reef National Park they had
never seen it before. Yet, when consultants saw deposits of crystals (though
outside the park boundaries) of ceremonial significance to this medicine
society, as well as ancient symbols of trails etched on rock, these tangibles
assumed a world of meaning. They acted to confirm the historical narratives
stored in memories, transmitted orally through hundreds of generations,
which suddenly became reinvigorated once they arrived at Capitol Reef.
Simultaneously, the National Park Service (as well as the state of Utah) be-
came aware of a potential chapter in its well-­aged history, which includes
 archeological sites of Archaic Period heritage. Any sites dated to this
timeframe within the park or on adjacent lands could have been those of
their ancestors.
The Hopi Tribe shares a common history with the Pueblo of Zuni. They,
too, emerged and began thousands of years of migrations. However, their
history with Capitol Reef starts with their ancestors who were farmers,
thousands of years later than when Zuni ancestors might have inhabited
the landscape. Like the Zuni, contemporary members of Hopi came to
Capitol Reef with pre-­existing knowledge of the symbol system their an-
cestors left on rock faces. Though they had never been to Capitol Reef, they
immediately recognized these ancient symbols, began reading the rocks,
and conveyed to the Park Service yet another saga. The image of the deity
who directed them to farm, to conduct rounds of migrations, and to leave
(archeological) evidence of their stay was etched at numerous sites within
the park. Where this deity is portrayed, farming took place at the site. They
saw icons of their clans on rocks that affirmed their pact, their chosen vo-
cation, as well as conveyed the histories of those clans. Other symbols told
about local agriculture, provided maps of the region, and formed portions
of altars for various ceremonies.
Ancestral Hopi beliefs essentially represented a religious revolution
spread by migrant farmers. These beliefs as much constructed Formative
sites at Capitol Reef, as did the needs of daily living. They explain why else-
where, at places such as Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, we
see a conscious process of reoccupation and remodeling residences. Clans
Fulfilling Destinies
were directed to stay temporarily then continue migrating. The Park Service,
in turn, came to have a fuller appreciation of why these farmers came to
and stayed in the region or then left. That knowledge, encoded in writing
on rocks, was deciphered through consultation with the elders of the Hopi
Tribe. The Hopi Tribe relayed to us that it was their ancestors who created
the farming sites within the Fold, that is, they had a role in making and
using all Anasazi- and Fremont-­style sites.  Formative Period sites were
identified in archeological survey.
The background knowledge gained through interviews with contempo-
rary Paiute and Ute about the Capitol Reef environment, combined with
fragments from historical records, reveals not an epic involving spiritual
mandates, but humans’ relationships with one another, as much as with the
environment where they made their living. Collectively the evidence helped
us move beyond a one-­dimensional view of Numic-­speaking ancestors as
food seekers. [These Numic people included in Utah the Shoshone, Goshute,
Southern Paiute, and Ute peoples.] What came into relief was a sense of the
camaraderie of families locally and regionally.
We get glimpses of spring celebrations, trading rendezvous, as well as
the traffic across the Fold to other enclaves to join in social gatherings or
grieve deaths. We learned that while early pioneers’ view of the Fold as a
barrier was true for them, for Numic-­speaking ancestors the Fold contained
corridors for travel replete with water. Blending sources of evidence also
helped us to see how resilient ancestral Paiute and Ute were in coping with
oppressive colonizing forces. A glimmer of the spiritual beliefs was revealed
in the reference to the Waterpocket Fold as containing a special rock that
was bequeathed by a patron spirit and was a place of renewal for those who
knew its location.
For traditional Navajo traveling to the land across the Colorado River
that includes Capitol Reef, all of the plants, animals, rocks, and other places
are imbued with life forces that protect, yield food, heal, and provide for the
well-­being of the travelers, their families, and livestock back home. These
beliefs about the land to the north affect the actions of individual Navajo
when they cross the Colorado River and as they continue to travel through
the landscape until they return home. Certain etiquette is required, which
means the creation of certain types of archeological sites.Rosemary Sucec

Navajo elders also relayed over  years of history with the study area
when all we had heard was anecdotal stories of horsemen traveling through
the park when the settlers lived there in the late nineteenth century. Oral
accounts pertaining to the Capitol Reef shields in tandem with radiocarbon
dating of the shields suggest Navajo ancestors were here as early as circa or the sixteenth century. Oral tradition alone hints at an even earlier occu-
pation, perhaps as early as the fifteenth century. This traditional knowledge,
new to Capitol Reef (if not the state of Utah), represents opportunities for
archeological investigation. Historical events such as the Puebloan Revolt
in the s, the Spanish Entrada into Utah shortly after, and the Kit Carson
roundup at mid-­nineteenth century may have resulted in the Capitol Reef
region becoming a place of refuge. . . .
Tribal histories with this environment literally span at least , years
and are continuous into the early twentieth century. Park Service adminis-
tration, by contrast, encompasses approximately  years. And while Indians
do not interact with the land the way they did in the past, what remains
are the tangible resources, places, and landscapes that are linked with their
cultures, including their histories, and that have been documented in and
paid homage to with this report. What also remains, but can be inadvertently
overlooked, are [in the words of anthropologists T. J. Ferguson and Roger Anyon,
who work with Native nations on cultural heritage preservation] the multiple
tribal “cultural processes of memory and history to renew the links with
[these tangible] places [that have been] forgotten, irregularly visited, or oc-
cupied by other groups.”
In the schema of human association with the Fold, the National Park
Service has become the most recent occupant in a long and distinguished
lineage of homesteaders. When juxtaposed with historical, legal, and envi-
ronmental construction of the Waterpocket Fold as a vacant wilderness and
as a barrier, this represents a daunting perspective — as well as a significant,
yet challenging, management responsibility.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
The Pectol Shields ()
Robert McPherson
Historian Bob McPherson taught for forty years at the Utah State University
campus in Blanding. His twenty books grow from dozens of interviews with San
Juan County old-­timers, Indian and non-­Indian. This narrative of the remark-
able leather shields unearthed in Wayne County in  comes from his Dinéjí
Na`nitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History. McPherson also wrote a
biography of John Holiday, A Navajo Legacy: The Life and Teachings of John
Holiday.
The shields remain controversial. Despite the story told in this excerpt, some
experts still believe the shields were made by Ute people, others by the Fremont.
Still others believe we can’t definitively know their origins.
Sparks from the piñon and juniper fire rose into the black night sky. ­Shadows
danced on the low alcove’s walls, flames flickering with wind currents. Nine
figures crowded beneath or stood outside a low overhanging ledge, as some
bent forward digging and peering into a hole in the sandy-­bottomed cave.
There was nothing to distinguish this particular site, a mere four feet by six
feet, from any other of the countless crevices and rock niches surrounding
the little town of Torrey and what would later become Capitol Reef Na-
tional Park, Utah. Supervising the excavation was Ephraim Portman P
­ ectol,
a Latter-­day Saint (LDS) bishop, entrepreneur, and promoter of Wayne
Robert McPherson

County. His wife, Dorothy; three daughters; their son-­in-law, Claude Holt;
and three other men assisted with what everyone anticipated to be a Native
American burial of some type. Earlier that day Ephraim and Dorothy had
discovered a cedar bark covering eighteen inches beneath the sandy floor
of the cave. They decided to let family members share the thrill of discovery,
returning with them and others in the evening for an enjoyable outing.
Growing anticipation accompanied the unveiling, with Ephraim hoping to
add something significant to his burgeoning collection of Indian artifacts
on display at home.
It was August , , twenty years after the US Congress passed the
Antiquities Act to protect archaeological sites from collectors and vandals.
In southern Utah, however, professional archaeologists as well as avocational
pot hunters burrowed into ruins, burials, and any other site that might hold
objects left behind by prehistoric Indians. Today, many of the efforts of even
the “trained, professional” archaeologists of the time would be classified
more as looting than scientific excavation. Collecting was everyone’s intent.
While large Ancestral Puebloan (Anaasázi) ruins like Mesa Verde (Colorado)
and Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) had been under the spade and trowel
of the Wetherill family at the turn of the twentieth century, what seemed
to be endless smaller sites drew less attention and were easily accessible to
local people. In south-­central Utah where Pectol lived, the highly developed
Anaasázi material culture gave way to the less dramatic Fremont remains.
Still, there were objects to be had and no telling what might be unearthed
during a dig of discovery.
Scraping away more dirt and removing a four-­inch cedar bark covering,
Ephraim exposed a circular piece of hide approximately thirty-­six inches in
diameter. Expecting to find a body with a few primitive tools, his eyes must
have bulged when he beheld three buffalo-­hide shields painted in ­dazzling
multicolored geometric patterns. Lifting the objects out of the ground and
into the flickering firelight, he “unearthed three of the most wonderful
shields ever seen by man. As we raised the front shield the design on two
shields came to view. For the space of what seemed two or three minutes,
no one seemed to breathe; we were so astonished. We felt we were in the
presence of the one who had buried the shields. And these words came to
me while in this condition: ‘Nephites and Gadianton Robbers.’” Beneath
Seeing Is Believing
the last object was a cone of earth that maintained the convex shape of the
tanned leather shields with their arm and neck carrying straps; next was a
bottom layer of cedar bark to guard against moisture.
Pectol’s and other LDS interpretations
What Pectol really discovered that evening was the beginning of a contro­
versy that remains to this day. Ephraim Pectol, very much a man of his
time, filtered what he saw through what he believed. His initial response to
what he saw as Nephites and Gadianton Robbers [in the ancient Americas,
a group of settlers and a criminal gang, respectively, in Joseph Smith’s Book of
Mormon] was totally in keeping with his experience as an LDS bishop for
sixteen years, steeped in the teachings of the Book of Mormon. Three trans­
oceanic crossings of Israelites before the time of Christ, the rise and fall of
Ephraim Portman Pectol and his two daughters, Devona (left) and Golda (right),
ca. –, with the three shields discovered in a Waterpocket Fold alcove
near Torrey by Ephraim and his wife, Dorothy, in . Photograph used with
permission of the Pectol Family Organization.Robert McPherson

the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations, the belief that their descendants
were directly connected with today’s Native Americans, and all of the reli-
gious teachings recorded before the fall of their society furnished dramatic
fare for interpreting archaeological remains. Mormons living in southern
Utah did not hesitate to connect ancient Indian artifacts and sites with these
events. Even the discovery of the shields took on religious tones. Dorothy,
guided by the Spirit, had directed her husband, who had not received as
strong an impression of where to dig: “You must dig into this and you will
find something.” And he did. . . .
The shields: Fame, defame, and reinterpretation
A continual proponent of Wayne County, Pectol spread information about
the Capitol Reef area’s prehistoric treasures. He showed the Noel Morss
archaeological expedition a few Fremont sites around Torrey in  and
. Morss was the first archaeologist to designate the Fremont Indians
as a distinct culture. Pectol and Morss revisited the rock shelter where the
shields had been discovered in hopes of finding more objects to provide
contextual clues to the shields, but they found nothing. Morss recognized
that the shields were anomalous in the archaeological record, and in his
report on the Fremont River drainage he expressed “the opinion that these
remarkable shields date from comparatively recent if not historic times. This
conclusion is based on their uniqueness among objects of ancient origin,
on their resemblance to modern Athabascan shields.... The shields, while
modern from the point of view of the Fremont culture, may still be old from
a historical standpoint.”
In addition to archaeologists, other people visited Torrey to see the
shields, which Pectol shellacked for protection, as he did many of his other
artifacts.... The holdings in the museum drew others to Wayne Wonderland,
a new name for the area now known as Capitol Reef and environs. Charles
Kelly — writer, researcher, and adventurer — initially came to Torrey to visit
Pectol’s museum. In  he became the first custodian of Capitol Reef Na-
tional Park [then, still a national monument]. The artifacts were also highly
revered among Pectol’s family members. His grandson, Neal Busk, remem-
bers playing a Fremont flute in the room above his general merchandise
store, something that would surely make an archaeologist shudder.
Seeing Is Believing
When asked where he found the shields, Pectol had Joe Covington, his
grandson, lead the inquirers to the rock shelter by a circuitous route coming
and going, making it difficult to relocate. Covington, with clear conscience,
took the people to the spot designated by Pectol, who had intentionally
misinformed him. The discoverer regarded the real site sensitive and sacred
enough to keep it hidden from all except his closest kin. Covington was
surprised years later when a family member led him to the real spot....
[By the late s, Pectol had loaned the shields to the Temple Square Mu-
seum in Salt Lake City. Two shields came back to Wayne County in the s,
and finally, in , the Park Service chose to display all three shields at the new
Capitol Reef Visitor Center.]
For forty-­six years, the shields rested comfortably in their display case
at Capitol Reef, receiving an occasional mention in archaeological jour-
nals. Then in , enter for the first time the Native American view. Rep-
resentatives from Zuni Pueblo visited Capitol Reef and saw some small
hide-­wrapped bundles containing bone, which they considered sensitive
grave objects, on display. At their request the items were removed. While
the relatively new Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
passed in , was not cited for removal of the items, the spirit of the law
was evident. Under this law the federal government recognized the rights
of Indian people to their ancestors’ cultural items, such as funerary, sacred,
and other cultural objects as well as human remains. Every museum and
federal agency was required to inventory and notify Native American tribes
of any objects that met these criteria. The artifacts were to be repatriated
“expeditiously” to a requesting tribe after it demonstrated cultural affiliation
with the artifact. The ruling criteria for this determination were to provide
a “preponderance of the evidence based upon geographical, kinship, bio-
logical, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral tradition,
historical, or relevant information or expert opinion....”
In  the federal government required all national parks to remove
NAGPRA items from display. The two remaining shields [on display in the
Capitol Reef Visitor Center] joined the third shield in the National Park Ser-
vice’s Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson. They then
became subject to repatriation. The Navajo Nation was the first to submit a
claim. By , the Utes in Uintah, the Paiute Tribe of Utah, and the K
­ aibabRobert McPherson

Band of Paiutes had also entered a joint repatriation request, as had the
Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute Tribes in Colorado. The primary ar-
gument offered by all claimants, except the Navajo, was rooted in cultural
affiliation. The lands where the shields surfaced were traditionally those of
the Paiute and Ute people. The Navajos provided a far more detailed expla-
nation of the origin and use of the shields.
In an effort to maintain impartiality while assigning ownership, the gov-
ernment hired four scholars...to prepare independent studies of the shields.
Based on physical evidence that included materials used in construction and
decoration, prehistoric rock art, historic tribal locations, cultural practices,
and other considerations, each person was to suggest which tribe he or she
thought had made the shields or state that affiliation could not be reason-
ably established. There was no definitive agreement....
John Holiday and the Navajo interpretation
The Navajo Tribe asked John Holiday, a Navajo medicine man and prime
witness, and three other tribal members to testify on behalf of its claim. Born
in Monument Valley, Utah, around , John grew up in the traditional
environment that eventually led to his becoming a Blessing Way singer and
a repository of cultural and historical knowledge. On March , , the
Navajo contingent met with National Park Service officials at the Western
Archeological and Conservation Center. Lee Kreutzer, cultural resources
program manager of Capitol Reef and lead investigator for the repatriation
claims, held a second meeting with John and two men from the Navajo
Nation Historic Preservation Department (NNHPD) in Monument Valley
on May , . He not only named the individuals who made the shields
and told how they got to the burial site, but he also interpreted the meaning
of the designs and the powers they held. What follows is a brief summary.
John has knowledge of family members who lived in the vicinity of the
No Name (Henry) Mountains, White Face (Boulder) Mountain, and the area
southeast of Richfield along the Fremont River. This was prior to the s
and the period known to the Navajo as the Fearing Time and the Long Walk,
when many were forced into exile at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. This region
is not traditionally viewed as Navajo land but rather as Ute territory. The
Navajos, who were following a nomadic, herding, hunting-­and-gathering
Seeing Is Believing
John Holiday, Navajo medicine man, .
Photograph by Gavin Noyes, Utah Diné Bikéyah.
lifestyle at this time, were constantly searching for verdant lands. John’s
grandmother, Woman with Four Horns (named after the type of goats she
raised), herded sheep in this area and was able to name other Navajo families
living close by.
According to John, the powers of the shields were created spiritually
at the beginning of the earth, as were medicine bundles used for healing
and protection. The holy people are the ones who control their powers and
assisted the first person who made the physical shields in question. These
objects are both a representation of nature’s invisible powers and a living
entity that can control and use those powers on the Navajos’ behalf. The
shields had been in the possession of eight generations of medicine men
before the Fort Sumner experience. Objects of this nature are viewed as
alive and so must be “fed” or renewed with songs, prayers, and pollen or
sacred stone (ntł’iz) offerings. Transmission of the shields, as with medicine
bundles (jish), is made from one medicine man to another, not within a
single family.Robert McPherson

Prior to the time of the Long Walk, a series of medicine men — some of
whom were from the Capitol Reef area — held the responsibility to renew
and safeguard the protective shields. Many Goats with White Hair created
the shields, making them in the Kaibab Mountains in a thick pine forest
with a circular clearing. Custody of the shields went to Man Who Keeps
His Mouth Open, then Yellow Forehead, Tall Skinny Man, Man Who Wants
to Sit Down, Side Person, Man Who Plays with the Wooden Cards, Man
with Metal Teeth, Ropey, and finally to Little Bitter Water Man. The shields
had different names: Earth Protective Shield, Heaven’s Protective Shield,
Mountain Protective Shield, and Water’s Protective Shield. They were deco-
rated with the likeness of the invisible protective powers held by the natural
entity named. For example, the Earth, a living being, has its own shield of
protection; by copying its elements, the Navajo can likewise draw upon its
protective powers. . . .
The powers of the shields, once renewed, could not be penetrated by
bullets and arrows or evil and witchcraft. They provided protection against
all things that can harm a person or a group under its power.
When the U.S. military and its Indian and New Mexican auxiliaries
warred against the Navajos to the south, those living near the Henry Moun-
tains remained safe and escaped exile to Fort Sumner: “The Navajo were put
in the ‘heart’ of the shields and were safe” [ John Holiday told Lee Kreutzer].
“They were not captured. They remained hidden in the Henry Mountains
and surrounding area where these sacred shields were and so were never
caught. . . . They did not go to Fort Sumner because they lived closer to the
sacred shields. It is said that these shields were often taken to other parts of
our land, throughout the Navajo communities, just as the sacred mountain
soil medicine bundle [jish] is carried around.”
During this time, however, as the people evaded detection, Ropey and
Little Bitter Water Man had control of the shields and wanted to prevent
their capture. Little Bitter Water Man hid them and left the area. He be-
came sick and died without telling anyone where the shields were hidden,
causing them to be “misplaced.” The powers were neglected, their influence
waned, and the invasion of Navajo lands and capture of the people resulted
in the four-­year imprisonment of over , Navajos. They had lost their
Seeing Is Believing
­ rotection. With the rediscovery of the shields, an opportunity to renew
p
these powers became possible.
Repatriation and aftermath
Based on an evaluation of all claims submitted by various bands and tribes,
Kreutzer recommended that the shields be returned to the Navajo Nation.
Her decision took immediate fire but was based in the very heart of the
repatriation process and Native American thought, in this case Navajo....
As for the claims of the various tribes, many of them were “non-­specific
and not linked to a particular oral tradition that they could share with
the National Park Service,” whereas those of the Navajo Nation were. The
others felt the place where the shields had been found was historically their
territory and that they had a responsibility to a higher power to reclaim
what they believed was theirs. Even though they shared dependence on oral
history and mnemonic devices — “external visual symbols such as costumes,
masks, totems, design motifs, petroglyphs, and pictographs as memory
aids” — as did the Navajo, most of this “information management strategy”
was lacking in their claim. Thus Kreutzer awarded possession of the shields
to the Navajo, who best fit the criteria outlined in NAGPRA.
Capitol Reef superintendent Albert Hendricks approved the transfer on
August , . John Holiday and Marklyn Chee of the NNHPO [Navajo
Nation Historic Preservation Office] drove to Tucson, retrieved the shields, and
brought them to Window Rock on August . Chee felt it was an emotional
journey. He drove while Holiday sang and prayed over the shields: “The
songs were to revive them and tell them ‘You’re home.’... It felt like a good
thing to bring them back.’” Because they are sacred objects, they are not on
display and continue to be subject to controversy.... Chee...reiterated that
the shields “are kept in the museum and are not on display. I repeat, not on
display. . . . They are for ceremonial purposes and they have been reintro-
duced into ceremonial use. . . .”
The odyssey of the Pectol shields began that August night eighty-­six
years ago and has continued ever since. Initially viewed as proof of the Book
of Mormon, the shields have seemed out of place in the Capitol Reef area.
The shields ...have been used to prove the validity of LDS temple ceremo-
nies, Native American ceremonies, and Masonic rituals. Archaeologists haveRobert McPherson

used the shields to assert a Northern Plains origin for the Fremont culture,
to refute such claims, and to suggest trade connections between southern
Utah and the Plains. They have been viewed as the reason the Navajos were
defeated in the s and spent four agonizing years at Fort Sumner. Until
, the shields were the subject of a Native American repatriation battle.
Underlying the controversy is a fundamental issue. Varying perceptions
have applied more “color” than is encountered on the physical objects. Even
those who pride themselves on their interpretation of factual evidence
struggle with finding a definitive answer as to creation and ownership. In
the meantime, Navajo medicine men occasionally remove the shields from
their containers to renew their powers, feeding them with prayers and songs.
Harmony and protection result. Others, not of the same inclination, want an
opportunity to study the shields further. Conceivably, this could open the
door to lawyers, standing in the wings and ready to apply their perception
of who holds proprietary rights to these objects. The odyssey could continue.
The crux of this controversy hits at the heart of how we write history, “do”
archaeology, and honor religious practices — for “seeing is believing.”Halls Creek and Lake Powell, from Hall Mesa, .Part III
EXPLORATION
Walking on the Flinty Mountains
The first non-­Native explorers who encountered Capitol Reef didn’t know
exactly where they were. John Charles Fremont’s unlucky Fifth Expedi-
tion ground to a halt after a snowy passage through Cathedral Valley and
over Thousand Lake Mountain. The expedition photographer, Solomon
Carvalho, nearly froze to death on this  journey, and his narrative of the
men’s experience is riveting. Carvalho’s daguerreotype of “Natural ­Obelisks”
in the park’s Cathedral Valley became the first photograph taken in Capitol
Reef. The modern photographer Robert Shlaer retraced Fremont’s route,
making his own twentieth-­century daguerreotypes of the same scenes
photo­graphed by Carvalho.
After Fremont came John Wesley Powell’s field crews, much better at
turning exploration into science. Jack Hillers (who became Powell’s chief
photographer) documents in this journal excerpt the first scientific traverse
of the Waterpocket Fold in , when Powell’s brother-­in-law A. H. Thomp-
son (known as “Prof”) took his men down Pleasant Creek. The Fold wasn’t
their primary destination. The crew was headed for the mouth of the Dirty
Devil River, east of the Henry Mountains, where they needed to reclaim a
boat they had cached on their Colorado River expedition.
Grove Karl Gilbert came next, delegated by Powell to investigate the in-
triguing geology of the Henry Mountains. The Henrys turn up in every geol-
ogy textbook as the place where Gilbert untangled the nature of laccolithic
mountains — where igneous rock has intruded between sedimentary beds,
pushing the overlying strata into mountainous domes, almost-­volcanoes.
Charles B. Hunt, who ran his own pack-­train fieldwork in the Henrys
as a US Geological Survey geologist in the s, looks back here at the
notebooks Gilbert kept in the s and finds insight and excitement in
them. In a  interview at his home in Salt Lake City, Hunt told me:

Part III: Exploration
Grove Karl Gilbert, ca. . ­Department of the
Interior/US Geological Survey.
Gilbert is my greatest teacher. Though I never met the man. He had
died before I became a cub geologist. But I had his field notebook
when I was working in the Henry Mountains.
Gilbert had the ability to argue with himself on paper. He’ll put
down an idea, and two or three pages later he’ll discuss that idea.
Pros and cons. On paper. And I also discovered that there were whole
sections in his Henry Mountain monograph that are verbatim out
of his field notes.
All I had in the way of a topographic map was a copy of the map made by the Powell survey. We went into the Henry Mountains
with a white sheet of paper.
The Plateau taught me astronomy. It’s glorious day or night. We
could see sixth magnitude stars down there in the Thirties. It was a
young man’s country. I couldn’t take today some of what I took then,
but I don’t feel regretful because some of the things I can do today
I couldn’t do then.Part III: Exploration

Hunt also told me a story about the conflicting names for the river
flowing through the park.
Gilbert refers to the river as the Dirty Devil clear up into Rabbit Val-
ley [the upper Fremont valley around Loa]. The maps were all calling it
Fremont when we were there, and I wanted to restore Powell’s usage,
but I knew the Board of Geographic Names would consult the local
people because their rule is — local usage prevails. Everybody I knew
called the whole river the Dirty Devil.
I knew they would contact Martha MacDougal, the Hanksville
postmistress, so I went into her office one day and asked her the name
of the river in this canyon below town.
She said, “Oh you mean the Dirty Devil.”
I knew I was in.
She said, “Nice people call it the Fremont. But there haven’t been
any nice people in Hanksville since a long time ago.”
Nevertheless, upstream from Hanksville it’s still “the Fremont.”
Exploration gradually eased into tourism. When experts in local geog-
raphy and lore like Dave Rust guided wealthy customers like George Fraser
(a New York City lawyer fascinated by John Wesley Powell’s explorations
on the Plateau), the party was out for adventure. Still, they traveled in such
unknown country that their early twentieth-­century records were often the
first we know from these places. We dip into George Fraser’s journal of a
trip from Cathedral Valley to Caineville.
When LDS apostle John Widtsoe traveled along the Waterpocket Fold
all the way to the Colorado River in , he and his party were among the
first non-Native travelers to do so. They knew where they were going, but
they were still reconnoitering — in this case, headed for Glen Canyon to look
for dam sites.The challenge of Capitol Reef in winter: Chimney Rock, .
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL AND
ADVENTURES IN THE FAR WEST ()
Solomon Nunes Carvalho (–)
Solomon Carvalho was perfectly content minding his Philadelphia business —
painting portraits and making daguerreotypes, using the first widely available
photographic process to fix images on copper plates — when John C. Fremont came
calling in August . The controversial explorer was headed west for his last
expedition, a second attempt to follow the potential railroad route along the th
parallel in winter. Fremont needed a chronicler, and he hired Carvalho, a Sep-
hardic Jew who was no outdoorsman but who was a well-­known photographer.
The trip was grueling and got worse after the party crossed the Green River
and headed for what would become Capitol Reef National Park. Oliver Fuller,
the assistant topographer mentioned in Carvalho’s piece, died a few days after the
men climbed over Thousand Lake Mountain from Cathedral Valley in the storm
recounted here.
Fremont and Carvalho and the rest of the expedition managed to push through
the snows to reach a meadow where the present town of Fremont sits just west of
the park at the foot of Thousand Lake Mountain. Here Colonel Fremont came to
grips with reality and decided to cache nearly all his gear, freeing the pack mules
of their burdens so his remaining men could ride and survive the rest of the jour-
ney westward to the Utah settlements. Fremont carved his name on a cottonwood
tree at the cache site, an inscription that survived for decades and gave the town
of Fremont its name.
Carvalho left the expedition in Parowan, but Fremont continued all the way
to California. Carvalho went home to the East Coast and never returned west. His

Incidents of Travel
Solomon Nunes Carvalho, ca. . Library of Congress.
account of his travels, the only description of Fremont’s final expedition, became a
bestseller. Most of Carvalho’s photographs were later lost in a warehouse fire, but
engravings made for a proposed book by Fremont preserved many of his scenes.
Though his expedition failed to convince America to build a transcontinental
railroad along his route, Fremont’s name remains on prominent display in Wayne
County. Fremont’s life and career continued for decades, careening from success to
failure until he died, nearly destitute, in .
Mr. Egloffstein, Mr. Fuller, and myself [the topographer, his assistant, and the
expedition daguerreotypist, respectively] were generally at the end of the train,
our scientific duties requiring us to stop frequently on the road. Mr. Fuller
had been on foot several days before any of the rest of the party, his horse
having been the first to give out. On this occasion, we started out of campSolomon Nunes Carvalho

together. We were all suffering from the privations we had endured, and, of
the three, I was considered the worst off. One of my feet became sore, from
walking on the flinty mountains with thin moccasins, and I was very lame
in consequence. Mr. Fuller’s feet were nearly wholly exposed. The last pair
of moccasins I had, I gave him a week before; now his toes were out, and
he walked with great difficulty over the snow. He never complained when
we started in the morning, and I was surprised when he told me he had
“given out.”
“Nonsense, man,” I said; “let us rest awhile, and we will gather fresh
strength.” We did so, and at every ten steps he had to stop, until he told us
that he could go no further.
Mr. Fuller was the strongest and largest man in camp when we left West-
port [the Kansas town where the expedition began in the fall of ], and ap-
peared much better able to bear the hardships of the journey than any man
in it. I was the weakest, and thought ten days before that I would have given
out, yet I live to write this history of his sufferings and death, and to pay this
tribute to his memory.
The main body of the camp had preceded us, and they were at least four
miles ahead. Both Mr. Egloffstein and myself offered our personal assistance;
Mr. Fuller leaned upon us, but could not drag one foot after the other — his
legs suddenly becoming paralyzed. When we realized his condition, we de-
termined to remain with him; to this he decidedly objected — “Go on to
camp,” said he, “and if possible, send me assistance. You can do me no good
by remaining, for if you do not reach camp before night, we shall all freeze
to death.”
He luckily had strapped to his back his blue blankets, which we carefully
wrapped around him. In vain we hunted for an old bush or something with
which to make a fire — nothing but one vast wilderness of snow was visible.
Bidding him an affectionate farewell, and promising to return, we told him
not to move off the trail, and to keep awake if possible.
Limping forward, Egloffstein and myself resumed our travel; the sun
had passed the meridian, and dark clouds overhung us. The night advanced
apace, and with it an increase of cold. We stopped often on the road, and
with difficulty ascended a high hill, over which the trail led; from its sum-
mit I hoped to see our camp-­fires; my vision was strained to the utmost,Early snow, Cathedral Valley, .Solomon Nunes Carvalho

but no friendly smoke greeted my longing eyes. The trail lost itself in the
dim distance, and a long and weary travel was before us. Nothing daunted,
and inspired by the hope of being able to render succor to our friend, we
descended the mountain and followed the trail.
It now commenced to snow. We travelled in this manner ten long hours,
until we came upon the camp.
Mr. Egloffstein and self both informed Col. Fremont of the circumstance,
and we were told that it was impossible to send for Mr. Fuller.
Overcome with sorrow and disappointment, I fell weeping to the
ground. In my zeal and anxiety to give assistance to my friend, I never for a
moment thought in what manner it was to be rendered. I had forgotten that
our few remaining animals were absolutely necessary to carry the baggage
and scientific apparatus of the expedition, and that, with a furiously driving
snow-­storm, it was almost folly to attempt to find the trail.
While we were speaking at our scanty fire of the unfortunate fate of
our comrade, Col. Fremont came out of his lodge, and gave orders that the
two best animals in camp should be prepared, together with some cooked
horse-­meat. He sent them with Frank Dixon, a Mexican, back on the trail, to
find Mr. Fuller. We supposed him to have been at least five miles from camp.
There was not a dry eye in camp that whole night. We sat up anxiously
awaiting the appearance of Mr. Fuller. Col. Fremont frequently inquired of
the guard if Mr. Fuller had come in.
Day dawned, and cold and cheerless was the prospect. There being no
signs of our friend, Col. Fremont remarked that it was just what he expected.
Col. Fremont had allowed his humanity to overcome his better judg-
ment.
At daylight, Col. Fremont sent out three Delawares to find the missing
men; about ten o’clock one of them returned with Frank Dixon, and the
mules; Frank had lost the trail, he became bewildered in the storm, and
sank down in the snow, holding on to the mules. He was badly frozen, and
became weaker every day until he got to the settlements. Towards night, the
two Delawares supporting Mr. Fuller, were seen approaching; he was found
by the Delawares awake, but almost senseless from cold and starvation; he
was hailed with joy by our whole camp. Col. Fremont as well as the rest of
us, rendered him all the assistance in our power; I poured out the last drop
Incidents of Travel
of my alcohol, which I mixed with a little water, and administered it to him.
His feet were frozen black to his ankles; if he had lived to reach the settle-
ments, it is probable he would have had to suffer amputation of both feet.
Situated as we were, in the midst of mountains of snow, enervated by
starvation and disease, without animals to carry us, and a long uncertain
distance to travel over an unexplored country; could any blame be attached
to a commander of an expedition, if he were to refuse to send back for a dis-
abled man? I say, no, none whatever. Twenty-­seven of our animals had been
killed for food, and the rest were much reduced, and without provender of
any kind in view. If this event had occurred six days later, there would have
been no animal strong enough to carry Mr. Fuller into camp.
But suppose he had been disabled while in camp, and unable to pro-
ceed, could blame attach to his comrades if he were deserted, and left to
die alone? This frightful situation was nearly realized on several occasions.
I again ­answer, no, not any — the safety of the whole party demanded their
immediate extrication from the dangers which surrounded them; every
hour, every minute, in these mountains of snow, but increased their perils;
on foot, with almost inaccessible rugged mountains of snow to overcome,
with no prospects of food except what our remaining animals might af-
ford — to stop, or remain an indefinite time with a disabled comrade, was
certain death to the whole party, without benefitting him; his companions
being so weak, that they could not carry him along....
After we crossed the Green River, the whole party were on foot. The con-
tinued absence of nutritious food made us weaker every day. One of my
feet was badly frozen, and I walked with much pain and great difficulty;
on this occasion my lameness increased to such a degree, that I was the last
man on the trail, and my energy and firmness almost deserted me. Alone,
disabled, with no possibility of assistance from mortal man, I felt that my
last hour had come; I was at the top of a mountain of snow, with not a tree
to be seen for miles. Night approached, and I looked in vain in the direction
our party had proceeded, for smoke or some indication that our camp was
near. Naught but a desert waste of eternal snow met my anxious gaze — faint
and almost exhausted, I sat down on the snowbank, my feet resting in the
footsteps of those who had gone before me. I removed from my pocket theSolomon Nunes Carvalho

miniatures of my wife and children, to take a last look at them. Their dear
smiling faces awakened fresh energy, I had still something to live for, my
death would bring heavy sorrow and grief to those who looked to me alone
for support; I determined to try and get to camp, I dared not rest my fatigued
body, for to rest was to sleep, and sleep was that eternal repose which wakes
only in another world. Offering up a silent prayer, I prepared to proceed.
I examined my gun and pistols, so as to be prepared if attacked by wolves or
Indians, and resumed my lonely and desolate journey. As the night came on,
the cold increased; and a fearful snow storm blew directly in my face, almost
blinding me. Bracing myself as firmly as I could against the blast, I followed
the deep trail in the snow, and came into camp about ten o’clock at night.
It requires a personal experience to appreciate the intense mental suffering
which I endured that night; it is deeply engraven with bitter anguish on my
heart, and not even time can obliterate it.
Col. Fremont was at the camp fire awaiting my arrival. He said he knew
I was badly off, but felt certain I would come in, although he did not expect
me for an hour.
My haggard appearance sufficiently indicated what I suffered. As I stood
by the fire warming my frozen limbs, Col. Fremont put out his hand and
touched my breast, giving me a slight push; I immediately threw back my
foot to keep myself from falling. Col Fremont laughed at me and remarked
that I had not “half given out,” any man who could act as I did on the oc-
casion, was good for many more miles of travel. He went into his tent, and
after my supper of horse soup, he sent for me, and then told me why he
played this little joke on me; it was to prevent my telling my sufferings to
the men; he saw I had a great deal to say, and that no good would result from
my communicating it. He reviewed our situation, and the enervated con-
dition of the men, our future prospects of getting into settlements and the
necessity there was for mutual encouragement, instead of vain regrets, and
despondency; the difficulties were to be met, and it depended on ourselves,
whether we should return to our families, or perish on the mountains; he
bade me good night, telling me that in the morning he would endeavor to
make some arrangements to mount the men.
The next day, he called the men together and told them that he had
determined to “cache” all the superfluous baggage of the camp, and mount
Incidents of Travel
the men on the baggage animals, as a last resource. Nothing was to be re-
tained but the actual clothing necessary to protect us from the inclemency
of the weather.
A place was prepared in the snow, our large buffalo lodge laid out, and
all the pack saddles, bales of cloth and blankets, the travelling bags, and
extra clothes of the men, my daguerreotype boxes, containing besides, sev-
eral valuable scientific instruments, and everything that could possibly be
spared, together with the surplus gunpowder and lead, were placed in it,
and carefully covered up with snow, and then quantities of brush to pro-
tect it from the Indians. I previously took out six sperm candles from my
boxes, and gave them to Lee, the Colonel’s servant, in charge; they were
subsequently found most useful. A main station was made at this place, so
as to be able to find it if occasion demanded that we should send for them.
The men now were all mounted; a large mule was allotted to me, and
we again started, rejoicing in having animals to carry us. After this, every
horse or mule that gave out, placed a man on foot without the possibility
of procuring others, and it was necessary in consequence of the absence of
grass to allow the mules to travel as light as possible; we therefore relieved
them frequently by walking as much as we were able.
SIGHTS ONCE SEEN
Daguerreotyping Fremont’s Last
Expedition through the Rockies ()
Robert Shlaer
Robert Shlaer taught himself the nearly lost art of making daguerreotypes in the
mid-­s and gave up his academic position as a neurophysiologist at North-
western to return to the West, where he’d grown up in New Mexico. He perfected
his craft, outfitted his minivan as a mobile laboratory, and set out to re-­create the
path and the photographs of Solomon Carvalho. After five years of work, Shlaer
published Sights Once Seen, recounting the two photographic journeys  years
apart, including this section on Carvalho’s crucial time in Capitol Reef.
After passing Wild Horse Butte, the expedition was finally able to turn west,
find more water by crossing Muddy Creek, and skirt the Moroni Slopes to
ascend by Salt Wash into Cathedral Valley. On the way they would have
seen the massive Factory Butte in front of the Henry Mountains to the
south. John Wesley Powell and his men are usually given credit for discov-
ering the “Unknown Mountains” in , but Frémont and his topographer
Egloffstein had them in sight for weeks in early . The range is placed
correctly on Frémont’s map, labeled “Réjas del oso” [“Bear grills or bars”].
Unfortunately, Frémont did not publish this observation in a timely manner,
leaving it for Powell to garner the honor of discovery.

Sights Once Seen
Following Middle Desert Wash while ascending Cathedral Valley,
Frémont and his weakening band could not have missed the fabulous sand-
stone cliffs and formations which give this region its visual interest, the most
dramatic of which have since been named by the National Park Service....
A telegraphic synopsis for the second volume of Frémont’s Memoirs
notes the desperate sufferings of his party which were to begin here:
Starvation again. Plenty of snow and no game. — THE OBELISKS. —
Cache our baggage. Men and animals weak. I give out on mountain-­
side — first time in all my journeying. Weakness temporary.
The spectacular steel engraving Natural Obelisks is the only vertical
landscape composition among those remaining from the fifth expedition.
It is the final surviving image, although a few more daguerreotypes were
made before Carvalho’s equipment was abandoned. The snow in which the
expedition later foundered is apparent in the engraving, and its ­shadows
indicate that the daguerreotype was made in the morning. From the site of
[­ Carvalho’s image titled] Colorado Valley (Wild Horse Butte), which is shown
without snow, to the “Natural Obelisks” is about forty miles, which probably
took Frémont’s weakening men two days. The date of Carvalho’s daguerreo-
type of the obelisks would then be January  or , . About January the expedition entered the Wasatch Mountains [Thousand Lake Mountain]
by climbing out of Cathedral Valley at its westernmost extreme.
Kent Jackson [a Wayne County man who managed the Capitol Reef orchards
for many years], who from his familiarity with this area immediately noticed
that the engraving Natural Obelisks was laterally reversed, also demonstrated
to me how Frémont must have skirted the Moroni Slopes and gone up Salt
Wash into Cathedral Valley, passed by the “Cathedrals” and the obelisks at
the north end of what is now Capitol Reef National Park, and then climbed
out between Geyser and Hens Hole peaks to the west. Thanks to Jackson,
Capitol Reef National Park now has a secure claim to a segment of the route
of Frémont’s fifth expedition.
When I was in the region, it looked as if a modern daguerreotype of the
obelisks with the snow as is shown in the engraving was an impossibility,
since the mild climate of the Great Colorado Valley has not changed since
Frémont consulted on it with the Utah Indians in December . However,Robert Shlaer

the night before I went into the Middle Desert to daguerreotype the obelisks
[locally called “Mom, Pop, and Henry,” names coined by Kent Jackson’s father,
Worthen Jackson] the region was blanketed with snow, although by the time I
reached the area and began work most of it on the slopes near the formation
had disappeared. I was very fortunate, since the Indians were correct — snow
here is rare and does not remain long. . . .
The entire Cathedral Valley is a wonderland of endlessly varied sand-
stone formations. The “Monoliths” are just a few miles west of the “Natural
Obelisks” and are the last of the great ones which Frémont and Carvalho
would have passed before entering the Wasatch Mountains. There Frémont
gave out for the first time in his life. . . . Later, he dealt with the incident
more completely:
We . . .were soon again involved among the snowfields of the moun-
tains. There remained now only the bed of the Wahsatch range to
cross. Here, for the first and only time in much travelling through
inhospitable lands, I fairly gave out. Going up a long mountain slope,
I was breaking my way through the snow a little way ahead of the
party, when suddenly my strength gave out. All power of motion left
me; I could not move a foot. The mountain slope was naked, but it
just happened that near by was a good thick grove of aspens, and
across a neighboring ravine the yellow grass showed above the snow
on a south hillside. Saying to Godey [a misremembered detail by Fre-
mont; according to Robert Shlaer, this was almost certainly the Delaware
Indian scout, Solomon Everett], as he came up, that I would camp there,
I sat down in the snow and waited. After a few moments, strength
enough came back, and no one noticed what had happened. The
next day we came upon a good camping ground, when I made a halt
and disencumbered the party of everything not absolutely necessary.
. . .The abandonment of the heavy baggage spells the end of Carvalho’s
daguerreian activities with the expedition, but the daguerreotypes Carvalho
produced were not included in the cache. Frémont retained these invaluable
records and ultimately returned to New York City with them.
The cache itself would, if found, provide a wealth of information about
the expedition and especially about Carvalho’s methods, since it contained(above) Natural Obelisks, steel engraving from a daguerreotype by ­Solomon
Carvalho, the first photograph taken in Capitol Reef; courtesy the ­Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. (opposite) Robert Shlaer’s  daguerreo­type
Natural Obelisks, re-creating Carvalho’s original image from ­Cathedral Valley.
Used with permission.
Sights Once Seen
his equipment. Unfortunately, all evidence indicates the hoard was recovered
in the spring of  by a former member of the expedition who had been
left by Frémont at Parowan. According to contemporary documents, this
man was subsequently killed by Indians, who appropriated and disbursed
the material. My attempts to locate fragments of Carvalho’s apparatus in the
museums of Utah have been unsuccessful.
Thus ended Carvalho’s grand panorama of the West, which he made in
the winter of – for Col. John C. Frémont.
PHOTOGRAPHED ALL THE BEST SCENERY ()
Jack Hillers (–)
In , John Wesley Powell led the first scientific exploration of the Colorado
River through the Utah canyon country and the Grand Canyon. When Powell
needed another boatman for his second expedition in the spring of , he hired
Jack ­Hillers, a German immigrant working as a teamster in Salt Lake City when
Powell encountered him. Hillers assisted Powell’s photographers until his skill,
stamina, and good humor (the boys called him “Jolly Jack”) earned him the po-
sition of permanent field photographer for both the US Geological Survey and
the Bureau of American Ethnology for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
This section of Hillers’s journal documents the pioneering  trek led by
Powell’s chief topographer, Almon Thompson, as he and his men, including Hillers,
cross Boulder Mountain and the Waterpocket Fold, bound for the Henry Moun-
tains and the Dirty Devil River. One of those newly explored peaks in the Henrys
would later bear the name Mount Hillers.
For these Anglo newcomers, this really was exploration. Thompson and his
field crew were working out the country. When they reached the Escalante River
basin, it took them a while to realize that this wasn’t the Dirty Devil River, that
they had just discovered a major new stream. They relied on Utes for advice and
local knowledge — but wrote about Indian people with the casual racism of men
of their time.
June In the afternoon we left the southern slope of the Lake Mountain Range
[Aquarius Plateau] and crossed to the east side. The country below us is all
cut up with gulches and cañons for miles — nothing but sand rock is visible.

Photographed All the Best Scenery
The Dirty Devil Range [Henry Mountains] from this point looks like a dry
country and almost impossible to get to them. The first peak is about miles from this point eastward.
June Prof. [Thompson] and Capt. [Captain Pardon Dodds, who had served as the
Uintah Indian agent before working with Powell’s men] went in a northeasterly
direction to find a trail or hunt up the best place for to get to the mountains
near which our river flows. Fred [Dellenbaugh, the young assistant topographer
who had been through the Grand Canyon with Powell on his river trip earlier
in ] and Johnson [William Derby Johnson, a Mormon settler working for
Powell in ] went southeast on a similar errand. Fen. [Fennemore, the pho-
tographer] and myself went down a cañon due east for pictures. Secured
three — a storm coming up we returned to camp. Shot a dusky grouse; on
our return found Fred and Johnson home. They reported having found
a heavy beaten but not very old trail leading in the direction of the mts.
About  p.m. Prof. and Capt. returned. Reported having seen fresh Indian
sign. Rained very hard.
June Followed the trail F. and J. had found which led us through small valleys
and cañons and to wind up, lead us down from the plateau on smooth sand
rock over a thousand feet high — horses often slipped for a number of feet.
Sometimes found ourselves on projected shelves, not over two and a half
feet in width, but got down all OK. The last turn brought us in sight of a
beautiful valley running northeast [Pleasant Creek] while from the west
came a rushing stream which flowed in a small cañon of sand. All along the
edges the cottonwood trees flourished. Camped in the cañon. Plenty feed for
our animals — wild oats in abundance. Followed fresh Indian tracks all day.
June Up and off early. While making a descent from a Bench we were attracted
by the bark of a dog. Looking in the direction from hence we heard it we
saw two squaws flighing through the grease wood, yelling as though they
had seen so many devils. We saw their camp on a small hill for which weJack Hillers

Old Time rocks. Tantalus Creek, Aquarius Plateau, Wayne County, Utah.
Photograph by Jack Hillers (National Archives).
started. On nearing an old man about seventy met us at the foot of the
hill, trembling like an aspen leaf. On reaching this camp found it deserted.
Guns, bows and arrows had been hastily left in their wickiups, but we soon
dismounted and seated ourselves around his camp fire, where we allayed
his fears by telling him to smoke, at the same time handing him tobacco.
At this token of friendship he steadied his nerves and began to talk. Found
him to be one of the Red Lake Utes down here to gather seeds. A quarter
Photographed All the Best Scenery
of a hour after in came the two frightened squaws, who began to chatter
like monkees. [A] little while after we saw two young men across a gulch
on a small hill. The Squaws began to call to them not to be afraid for we
were Tuitchea T
­ icabu (very friendly). They soon came slowly toward us
looking like shamed men — no doubt they felt so. After smoking and talking,
They begged us to go into camp and trade with them. Prof. being anxious
to know about the country at large, and all about the trail, he consented
to camp — traded several buck skins. I obtained a splendid skin for a small
paper of paint.
June Struck off on a trail up the valley — followed it into a cañon. About a mile
from its mouth we lost sight of it with the exception of a track here and
there — probably cattle feeding. This is the great hiding [place] of the Indians
and many heads have found their way in here, all stolen from the Mormons,
who never suspected for a moment that their friends the Utes would do the
like, but thinking the Navajoes the guilty Party. The Utes always watched
the opportunity, when a band of the former were in the settlements. The
Mormons could track their stock for quite a ways, but as soon as they got
into a sandstone country they gave up the chase, being impossible to track
them over the bare sandstone, and no one thought it for a moment possible
to get down to the valley below. They never dreamed that here the Indian
feasted on broiled steak. Wild oats grow here the same as cultivated does
anywhere else but not so heavy. At present is the time when the Indian
gathers his yearly supply of seeds and nuts. Those which we left had quite a
crop gathered. I have no doubt that our party is the first white party here. The
Indians felt surprised how we got in — asked numerous questions — how we
found our way in. Wandered about all day trying to find a trail which would
lead us out of the cañon besides the one we came in by without success. The
cañon walls are perpendicular from  to  ft. in height.
June On the search again. At noon Prof. concluded that four of us should climb
out and head all the gulches. Prof. and myself went one way while Capt. and
Fred went the other. Found a nice level Platteaux on top, but no sign of aJack Hillers

trail, but found some very old horse dung, probably three or four years old.
After heading all the side gulches we walked towards the mountains. Here
we found ourselves on the divide. We could see the break of the Colorado
plainly and only about twenty miles distance. Half the south side of the
mountain is drained by a large cañon flowing east to c. [Colorado] while the
other half flows west and then north into the Dirty Devil River which flows
on the north side east into the Colorado. Having studied out our course we
were bound to get out of the cañon. On our return we climbed down one
of the side cañons and here we thought we could get up with a little work,
but rather hard for the horses, but we were bound to get up. On our return
about  PM found Capt. and Fred in camp, who reported having seen no
sign of a trail, but had found about three miles from where we climbed out,
two water pockets, and as our camp was about that distance from the water
in the cañon, we concluded to try our cañon wall. After two hours’ work
we reached the top. One horse fell backward while going up a steep ledge
and fell about ten feet, but picked himself up, shaked himself, and tryed it
again — that time succeeded in reaching the top. Camped near the pockets.
GILBERT’S NOTEBOOKS ()
Charles B. Hunt (–)
Charley Hunt, as his fellow scientists knew him, was a legendary field geologist
known, especially, for his work on the Henry Mountains and the geologic history
of the Colorado River. He cofounded the Utah Geological Society and taught at
Johns Hopkins, the University of Utah, and New Mexico State University. He also
served as director of the Geology Unit for the US Geological Survey. Hunt began his
career in , just eleven years after G. K. Gilbert’s death, and he loved retracing
Gilbert’s footsteps.
Gilbert’s field notes about Utah’s Henry Mountains are far more than a day-­
by-day account of his activities and observation. Reading them in the context
of the status of knowledge about geological science at that time, –,
one quickly finds that the notes are an exciting record of what were totally
new scientific discoveries representing milestones — breakthroughs — in the
history of geological knowledge. One experiences the thrill of reading the
firsthand account of the discovery of several concepts that today are accepted
routinely as fundamental in the science.
Grove Karl Gilbert, –, was one of the greatest geologists America
has produced. Many share my opinion that he was the tallest of the several
giants who contributed so much to the healthy development of the young
science. His contemporaries evidently thought so also, because twice they
elected him President of the Geological Society of America, the only person
to be so honored. His contributions, of course, are recorded in his published
Charles B. Hunt

Henry Mountains from above Fivemile Wash, Capitol Reef, .
monographs, but his field notes provide an inside view of how his major
discoveries developed.
Why Gilbert studied the Henry Mountains
John Wesley Powell, in his trips down the Colorado River (–), had
a good view of the two southern Henry Mountains and saw that they were
structural domes associated with “lavas.” Geologists of that time still were
debating whether volcanoes were “craters of elevation” [ formed by the cata-
clysmic upheaval of overlying strata] or merely piles of accumulated lava and
other ejecta around the craters. Powell could see that the two mountains
were domed, for the massive Triassic-­Jurassic sandstones conspicuously rise
on their flanks. The “lavas” could be seen as dark masses at the centers of the
domes, and specimens could be examined in the drainage courses off the
mountains. Surely these were craters of elevation.
And so Powell arranged for Gilbert to visit the Henry Mountains and
determine the facts. To reach the Henry Mountains, Gilbert had to cross the
lavas of the High Plateaus, from Salina Canyon south to Fishlake and around
Rabbit Valley east of Fishlake. From a distance, and for quite a while after
Gilbert’s Notebooks
being in the Henry Mountains, Gilbert continued to accept the idea that
likewise the igneous rocks in the Henry Mountains are lavas and referred
to them as such in his first notebooks.
Getting there
Most of southeastern Utah and all of the Henry Mountains area was a vast,
unmapped, vacant wilderness during the s when Gilbert made his trip
there. Of the Spaniards who explored the southern part of the Colorado
Plateau in the th century, only Cardenas saw the Colorado River — at the
Grand Canyon in . Only Escalante, in , crossed the river. Ives ()
was the first of the U.S. exploratory surveys to describe the region. He wrote
discouragingly, “It seems destined by nature that the Colorado River, along
the greater part of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and
undisturbed.” This still seems to be the view of Utahns, despite the fact that
southeastern Utah’s unparalleled scenery is potentially the state’s greatest
resource.
Other exploratory surveys east of the Colorado River while Gilbert was
visiting the Henry Mountains could have seen the Henry Mountains only
as unidentified peaks. Holmes’ [W. H. Holmes, another of the Powell Survey’s
scientists] interpretation of the intrusive structure at Ute Mountain (Sierra El
Late) anticipated Gilbert’s interpretation of the Henry Mountains. In fact,
Holmes even recognized that the bulging intrusions there are linear and
radiate from a center. And Gilbert surely was mindful of the fact that Peale’s
[Albert Peale, yet another nineteenth-­century USGS geologist] attempt to study
the La Sal Mountains had to be aborted because of hostility of the Indians.
The Henry Mountains did not appear on any map until Powell discov-
ered them in . Powell named them for Joseph Henry, physicist at the
Smithsonian Institution who assisted Powell in obtaining financial support
for his exploration of the Colorado River. Even as recently as the s, when
we made our survey of the region, it still was the center of an area the size
of New York State without a railroad (and it still is), and a third of that was
without a road of any kind. The Henry Mountains and the country around
them still was pack-­train country, and to work there provided an opportunity
to share the experiences of pioneers like Gilbert and his party who made
the first maps. Ours was the last of the big pack-­train surveying projects thatCharles B. Hunt

had begun in the s as surveys for a transcontinental railroad — the end
of an era.
How did Gilbert find his way across thousands of square miles of vacant,
unmapped, rugged wilderness to reach the Henry Mountains, and how was
he able to always complete a day of travel and end at a spring? He did so by
following the prehistoric Indian trails. So also did the frontiersmen who
explored for grazing or farm lands and the three parties of prospectors who
had preceded him to the Henry Mountains. To explorers like Gilbert, those
Indian trails were as easy to follow as a modern freeway. They were the con-
spicuous routes through the otherwise trackless wilderness before there was
grazing by livestock. Moreover, one can even find directional signs along the
trails indicating whether one is approaching water or going away from it.
The secondary trails of coyotes, foxes, and rabbits diverge from the main trail
away from water; they converge toward water. These signs of the past still
are preserved in Death Valley where there has been no grazing. That Gilbert
knew these signs and could use them to his advantage is indicated by the
ease with which he generally found satisfactory camp sites that provided the
pasturage and water for his animals as well as his men. In two field seasons,
only a couple of his camps proved unsatisfactory.
To considerable degree this still was true of the Henry Mountains area
during the s, and the geologists had to learn to distinguish between the
“big” trails and the “dim” ones. The ancient Indian trails had by then been
destroyed by livestock, but the cows and wild horses marked the routes to
and from water.
Gilbert knew he was pioneering in exploring the Henry Mountains area,
and his published report begins: “The Henry Mountains have been visited
only by the explorer.” He further wrote, “No one but a geologist will ever
profitably seek out the Henry Mountains . ..,” but he reveals his enthusiasm
for the area by following this statement with three or four pages of discus-
sion of how to get there. “At Salt Lake City he can procure pack-­mules and
pack saddles, or ‘aparejos’ and everything necessary for a mountain outfit.”
IN CATHEDRAL VALLEY ()
George C. Fraser (–)
Dave Rust (–) combined a childhood in southern Utah, an education
at Brigham Young University and Stanford, and a boundless love for the natural
history and geography of the Plateau. Working with this mix, he pioneered the
role of today’s backcountry guide. Educator, elected official, entrepreneur, poet,
cowboy, devout Mormon, gardener, and guide, Rust hoped those who adventured
with him would “love my country — Powell loved it; Dutton loved it; I love it, and
so must you.”
Each summer he led his well-­heeled travelers from the East Coast on month-­
long pack trips and river trips through Capitol Reef, to the top of Boulder Moun-
tain, and across the southern Utah canyons. Here’s a description of one of those
trips, from George Fraser’s journals, edited by Fred Swanson — who is Dave Rust’s
biographer, as well.
Fraser made a half-­dozen trips to the Southwest over twenty years, with his
son or one of his daughters, in turn. Fraser was a Wall Street lawyer with a de-
gree in geology from Princeton and an unending curiosity about both the land
and people of the Southwest. Dave Rust was his favorite guide. Fraser was Rust’s
favorite customer.
Tuesday, July , The South and Middle Deserts are valleys with steep cliffs bounding a flat
waterless sandy bottom. Our camp was at the summit of the cliff forming
the terminus of the South Desert approximately  feet high.
[Dave] Rust had been familiar with this country when a boy and up to
about  years ago, but since that time had not been here. Nevertheless, he
George C. Fraser

remembered where water was to be had. While he and George [the writer’s
son] took the water keg and water bags about a quarter mile northerly from
the camp, I sat on the brink of the cliff bounding the South Desert and
studied the Henry Mountains and the water pocket fold, the latter forming
the southerly or southwesterly boundary of the South Desert. After getting
water at : p.m. we walked about three-­quarters of a mile to the head of
Middle Desert. The coloring and sculpture here is beyond anything we have
seen. The cliffs rise precipitously from the flat, barren desert floor  feet,
perhaps  feet. They are bedded horizontally. The top is of white, very soft
cross-­bedded sandstone, beneath which is a brilliant carmine sandstone
or shale. Rising from the desert floor separate from bounding cliffs are
numerous temples. These are wholly of carmine rock, the white bed of the
summit having been eroded off. The desert is sandy, cream to yellow, with
a few piñons and cedars showing patches of green. On the summit of the
cliffs, accentuated and silhouetted as it were, basalt boulders lie on the pure
white sandstone.
The sun set clear save for some fleecy clouds to the north. Sitting on the
brink of the cliff at the head of the South Desert, the Henry Mountains rose
against the sky, appearing in the light of the setting sun first blue, then gray-
ish in the haze of the cloudless sky, and as the sun went below the horizon
and still touched them, they appeared burnished with gold which gradually,
as the light waned, turned to lilac until their illumination ceased.
The prevailing tone of the foreground was magenta with white and
terracotta streaks due to the wash from above. In the desert were patches of
piñons and cedar, the distant ones appearing black, those nearby vivid green.
The silence was complete save for an occasional bird call and the buzzing
of gnats and mosquitoes. These were very troublesome until sun-­down, but
did not bother us thereafter. The change in temperature this evening from
last night was very marked, but the night was comfortably cool.
Wednesday, July , Up  a.m. Clear, except for a few clouds to the north. A golden sunrise.
Left Camp  [at] : a.m. The horses had poor pickings all night and we
had a long ride to go to Caineville over a dry and desolate route. Rust told
me that when ten years of age he was once taken over this desert and some
time afterward was told to take his horse and a pack animal and make alone
In Cathedral Valley
the trip we were setting out on. He started early and long after dark found
his way back to camp. The pack had turned on his horse. He did not know
how to pack the animal himself, he did not know his way and all he could
do was to get himself back to the point from which he had started. That is
the school in which he was brought up and where he learned the secret of
direction and how to fix land-­marks.
About four miles down the valley we saw rising from the valley floor a
curious three-­fingered butte or temple, a remnant of a lava dike that crosses
the valley. There are many of these dikes. Some of them can be traced for a
mile or more; also some lava flows capping the surface of the plateau on the
easterly side. A large butte rises in the center of the valley, and a mile beyond
that appears a graceful Temple, the most picturesque feature of the landscape
on this trip. This rises about ' from the valley floor and is composed of
magenta sandstone or shale, the overlying beds having been eroded off.
It was hot and the dust raised by the pack horses which we drove made
riding trying. As there was no water between the spring and Caineville, we
filled the keg and loaded it on the mule. About  o’clock the mule tried to
roll, the water barrel having chafed its back, so we stopped for three-­quarters
Lower South Desert, Capitol Reef, .George C. Fraser

of an hour, repacked the mule, drank all the water we could, emptied the
barrel and ate a little. The traveling in a southwest wind was hot, but the
sun’s rays were tempered by a few clouds.
About two miles beyond where we repacked the mule, we turned south-
east up a draw and left South Desert, descending into the two-­mile wide
Blue Flat. The bottom of Blue Flat is a dry, powdery grayish mud sun-­dried
and in low spots like a quick-­sand, very treacherous, so that we were com-
pelled to keep to high ground. It is entirely barren and very dusty.
Ascending the easterly up-­dip slope of Blue Flat over bare rock we came
to the summit of a precipitous wall bounding an anticlinal valley known
as the Red Desert. This is an elliptical area bounded by a wall of reddish
shale apparently only broken down at one point. The bottom of this valley
is uneven and hummocky. The red beds are interspersed with whitish and
bluish gray thin layers of shale entirely bare of vegetation and bedded nearly
horizontally. On account of this coloring and the uneven weathering of the
surface, the floor of the desert is striped and blotched and patched like a
cross between a leopard and a zebra.
We climbed the wall to the south, first over the red rocks and then over
a yellowish sandstone and conglomerate, followed a deep wash through the
yellow sandstone southwesterly into the valley of the Dirty Devil [today’s
mapmakers call this river the Fremont until it joins the Muddy River at Hanks-
ville to form the Dirty Devil ], striking the road running parallel with the river
about one mile above Caineville. Arrived : p.m. Very hot. We camped by
the road at Curtis’s Ranch, the first one we struck on reaching town, on the
north bank of the river. We were very tired, hot and dirty, so at once made
for the river to get a bath.
The Dirty Devil is full of silt, very shallow and very swift. George and I
undressed on a mud-­bank in full sight of the whole town, but there seemed
to be no one there that we could disturb. We lay in the dirty water and
rolled over on the pebbles, with each roll getting a little more of ourselves
wet, and all the while fought mosquitoes that covered us like a blanket. If
not cleansing, the bath was at least cooling, so that we were able to partially
enjoy a belated lunch around :.
After lunch or supper we walked “down town.” The town consists of a
few, perhaps , tumble-­down shacks strung along the north bank of the
In Cathedral Valley
Dirty Devil over a distance of a mile and a half. We asked a boy where the
store was. He said Osterberg (a Swede or Dane) kept a little candy but there
was no store. We found Osterberg’s and were told that everything he had,
which consisted solely of candy and tobacco, had been sold out on the th
of July, except one box of chocolates which sold for $. a pound and that
apparently had been there for years. We induced Mrs. Osterberg, however,
to let us have five pounds of sugar from her private stock.
ONE OF THE GREAT TRIPS OF THE WORLD ()
John A. Widtsoe (–)
In the fall of , John Widtsoe, LDS apostle, Harvard-­educated chemist, agri-
cultural reclamation scientist, and former University of Utah president, floated
through Glen Canyon with a group of engineers and high-­level bureaucrats to
survey dam sites. They came here to prepare for the upcoming November meeting
in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to portion out the Colorado River’s water in the Colo-
rado River Compact. To reach Glen Canyon, the party passed through what would
become Capitol Reef National Park, via the “road” through Capitol Gorge, then
south all the way down Halls Creek to the Colorado River.
Widtsoe’s journal wasn’t published until after his death, but he turns out
to have a dry wit and sharp eye. His journey resonates with the integrity of the
Waterpocket Fold before Glen Canyon Dam, when Halls Creek flowed unfettered
to the Colorado River — a connection lost beneath the reservoir planned so enthu-
siastically by Widtsoe and his companions in their certainty that the Colorado
River needed “controlling” and water needed to be “stored.”
Sept. th, Monday
Left Richfield about : a.m. Delay due to one machine breaking. One big
truck for equipment and three of our party. Two passenger autos for the
remainder. Drove by way of Glenwood over mountains. Clouds in great
masses under a blue sky. Stetson wonders if we shall see anything finer.
Caldwell doesn’t know. Everybody else has opinions. Drove to Grass Valley
over mountain — , feet elevation, down to Loa. The day again perfect,
rather cold....

One of the Great Trips
Left Loa at : p.m. . . . In short time the high plateau country opened
with its variety of colors, fantastic shapes; aeolian cuttings, buttes, towers, etc.
Passed through many little villages — Lyman, Bicknell, near Teasdale, Fruita,
where we had fruit. In Fruita met party of young ladies well dressed which
caused much favorable comment from the party.
Heavy rains yesterday had cut into Capitol Wash roads. About four
miles down road had to be repaired  or  times. Whole company out mak-
ing roads — cars swinging at all angles over broken roads. We got through
without mishap. A glorious canyon — approaching at the upper end, Zion
Canyon. The day perfect with a few threatening clouds. Caldwell, Stetson
and Dennis, on freight wagon, up in the air part of the time. Looked like
professional acrobats. Stetson takes photos from top of truck — probably
moving pictures. Everybody happy.
Out of Wash a mile or two darkness came. Camped near first ranch
on Pleasant Creek [Notom]. Caldwell, Stetson and I made beds under a
branching cottonwood, not far from Pleasant Creek. It rained, or rather
sprinkled. Too dark to investigate larder. So bacon and eggs. Butter lost. Full
moon — fine evening — Stetson sore and tired. Talks of sleeping. Elev. feet. LaRue calm, but terribly worried about the butter. A. P. Davis during
day told of organization of Geological Survey. We decided (?) to rename
Capitol Wash — Capitol Gorge.
Sept. , Tuesday
Broke camp at sunrise and left Pleasant Creek. Still in autos. : a.m.
reached Bowns Ranch on Sandy Creek [today’s Sandy Ranch]. A shack or
two — headquarters for the ranging crew. Tough automobile roads. Saw two
wild animals and squirrels on the trip! The scenery beggars description....
Changed baggage here from auto to wagons. Two four horse teams. Bag-
gage and bedding and provisions — in wagon; passengers on top. A hot day,
with a gentle wind moderating the heat. No shade. Drove at about  miles
per hour. . .. Everybody in good temper. The scenery continues wonderful.
We travel in gulches and draws. Vegetation very scarce, though at Bowns an
abundance of Russian Thistle. . . . Unusual range of layered rocks, towering,
 feet high on one side and equally high red sandstone cliffs on other.
Towers, castles and buttes etc., break the level strata.... Towards evening leftJohn A. Widtsoe

red sandstones, into a narrow valley of white sandstone and limestone. No
water; no animal life; one mourning dove all day; scanty vegetation; true
desert. Here and there, where a flood has washed, there are deep chasms
showing soils – feet deep. Traveled from Bowns about  miles.
Camped in a dry spot by side of road, near Bitter Creek. Made beds; then
supper. Party tired. Our camp is in a valley about ⁄ miles long; ⁄ miles
wide. The usual horizontal white and red rocks seem tilted on end. On the
side of the valley opposite to the camp east runs Bitter Creek — which is not
much more than a seep. Over the low ridge west of the camp is a small
romantic valley; which, as the full moon filled it with mystery and beauty
held me for a long time. On the east ridge is the clear outline of a camel
resting. The head is distinct; the neck somewhat depressed, the back with
two humps very marked. This is a good land mark. Camp and place called
The Camel’s Rest.
Wednesday, Sept. , Full moon throughout the night. Warm and balmy until early morning
when a wind arose followed by a drop in temperature. All up at :. Break-
fast. No water for washing unless we go nearly a mile to Bitter Creek. An
unwashed crowd. Everybody happy. Stetson did not sleep well. Mr. Davis
loaned me needle and thread and I sewed on button.
The rising sun lighted up the yellow west wall with a golden splen-
dor, glorious to the soul. A flock of geese cackled through the gray of the
dawn. Some mourning doves were seen at sun rise. Crickets here and there
faintly throughout the night. We were off for Muley Twist. No one knows
distances from Bown’s ranch. Probably about  miles to River. The draw
narrows and the scenery becomes rougher and more picturesque. About
six miles down we pass the Crotch where a branch of the road takes off into
Hanksville ­country. Over hill and dale, skidding on rock and soft earth and
making sharp curves we finally come to Muley Twist Canyon (a muley horse
died there.) The road through Muley Twist Canyon takes off from our road
and goes into the Escalante, Hole in the Rock, and Tropic (Bryce Canyon)
country. Muley Water Holes are just south of the Canyon. The whole side
of the gently sloping mountain is white sandstones with pockets here and
there. Water collects in these holes. The lower ones accessible to stock, the
One of the Great Trips
higher ones are not. On the east side of Muley are the red sandstones. One
huge dominating red butte, the largest so far, forms a decided landmark. We
are traveling in Grand Gulch. Numerous places here could well be named.
Three miles above Muley on west of road is a great red sandstone bluff,
which from the north looks like a sphinx. We named it Sphinx Bluff. A little
lower down on the very edge of the western cliff is the outline of a locomo-
tive, furnace and all. We named it Locomotive Valley. We stopped about  a.m.
at Muley Tanks for lunch. We had lemonade! Also good water!!
. . . Some cattle seen along road this a.m. Nearly all white faced; sleek
and fat. LaRue and Birdseye hunted cotton tail rabbits. Shot four. There is
so much magnificent scenery that in spite of our best desires, we are not
appreciating it as we should. Marvelous how man becomes callous! After
lunch I picked flints and agates from creek bed and chips from Indian work.
Also one spearhead and a beautiful dark red flint knife (skinning knife.)
We traveled down Grand Gulch [Halls Creek] on the rocky creek bed. The
Gulch has narrowed, the scenery has increased in grandeur. About four p.m.
we stopped for fifteen minutes at Fountain Tanks hollowed out by wind
Lower Muley Twist Canyon at sunset, Capitol Reef, .John A. Widtsoe

in spots of soft material. Then on to head of Hall Creek where we camped
for the night. At this point on west side of canyon, great sloping mountain
sides of gray sandstone or limestone. Pots hollowed out everywhere. Pools of
water in river or creek bed, though evidences everywhere that at flood time
the water runs  to  feet or more higher. In one case a cottonwood stands
exposed in six feet of earth, the bark fully down to bottom, showing how
earth had been gathered around tree, then washed away again. A fluctuating
country wherever the water can reach it.
About three miles up from camp passed some high cliffs composed of
earth and pebble conglomerate. Weathering wherever a flat rock had fallen
had produced high pillars, with the rock on top. Named it Toadstool Curve.
Fine moon again at night though late because of  feet of vertical red
cliff just beyond our beds, on east side. Fried rabbit for supper. In bed about
: p.m. Camp elev. .
Thursday, Sept. , Up at  a.m. Started at : a.m. Crossed Hall’s Divide. Bad road. Then down
creek bed nearly all the time until we reached Hall’s Ranch at : a.m.
Half of party went through canyon of Hall Creek [Halls Creek Narrows].
Wonderful they declare. Called it Canopy Gorge from overhanging rock.
Vast amphitheatre there with perfect acoustics. About six miles of rounding
narrow gorge — in places only  feet across. Rested horses and had lunch
at Hall’s Ranch. Old ranch house now moved away. Country continues the
same. High horizontal red cliffs to east; high nearly vertical gray cliffs to
west. Probably traveling along fault line, now Grand Gulch. Party that went
through Canopy Gorge doctoring blistered feet.
This whole trip from Loa down has been wonderfully picturesque —
more than that: full of magnificent scenery, and a remarkable variety of
forms. A good trip for a geological party or for any lovers of nature. The
country is of course similar to that on the road down to Cainsville and
Hanksville, but very different in detail. To go down this way, then up the river
and back by way of Hanksville would be one of the great trips of the world.
Publicity should be given to this region. Hall’s Crossing named from Hall’s
creek which enters the Colorado River at that point. Hall’s Creek named
for Hall’s Ranch, at which I am now writing. We have traveled along one of
One of the Great Trips
the emigrant trails leading to San Juan County. Mr. Pace, one of the original
party to cross the Colorado in  still lives in Loa, where I had a conver-
sation with him as we came down on the trip. All along the road in Grand
Gulch, upper portion especially, are small areas that could be cultivated if
water were available. Apparently from the flood marks, there is ample water
leaving the gulch to care for all the lands and surplus, a big one, if stored.
There are numerous places where storage could be effected; the chief danger
and obstacle being the shifting conditions at flood time, and the fierceness
of the floods when they come. The reclamation of these small areas is not,
probably, a problem of this generation. . ..
Left Hall’s Ranch for Baker’s Ranch at  p.m. Reached Baker’s Ranch
at  p.m. Small three roomed shanty, cistern and corral at Bakers. Now run
by two Baker brothers, sons of Brother Baker of Richfield who bought the
ranch. Left Baker’s at : p.m. Canyon widens. Can see across Colorado
into San Juan Country. . . .
The cliffs or mountains that have followed us on the east all the way
down Grand Gulch — great thicknesses of chocolate colored rock, in hori-
zontal strata, underlaid by red rock — terminates a mile or two below Bakers.
A bold magnificent cliff projects at the end looking towards the Colorado
River, and forms a great landmark. Lower down towards the Colorado River
we can look back and see the other side of this chocolate capped red rock
beneath the mountain. It is as sheer on that side as on the side we have seen
from Grand Gulch. The mountain on the west side of Grand Gulch, gray
and vertical, also terminates long before the River is reached. As we look
back on them they are covered forest like with knobs or nipples. The party
suggested we call it Nipple Mountain. On the way we get a magnificent view
to the east of the Henry Mountains rising out of the broken country. The one
farthest north seems the highest — probably Mt. Ellen. Look up.
. . . Hall’s creek has cut deep into the rock, forming a very high and nar-
row canyon. As we approach the River, two miles away can be seen the
sheer, red wall against which the River runs on the east side. Then, great,
barren, smooth rocks like those on the beaten shoreline, except a hundred
times larger, along which we slide. Suddenly, in a cut in the rocks, we get a
view of the River. A long and wide beach, with several fine clumps of trees.
Just beyond the beach down stream the River turns sharply to the left, justJohn A. Widtsoe

below the junction is Hall’s Creek, between sheer cliffs,  feet high, and
only  feet apart. All along the River, the cliffs to the last sheer and high
red sandstone.
On the top of the first hill we meet the boatmen.... Over the cliffs we
reach the camp in a beautiful grove of cottonwoods. I go down to look at the
River and the boats. Evidences here and there of dredging operation and oil
service. The Colorado — yellowish brown, but stately and certain of its own
value. Relatively few men have been here. Many emotions arise. The wagons
arrive. All well. The first stage of the expedition is over. Just five days from
home.... Early supper, cooked by the boatmen. Talk and plans. In bed at :.
The full moon filled the valley with a new beauty. The high sheer wall to the
east looked dark and forbidding; the lower range on the west glowed with
a living glory. The small valley had its sounds — the sounds of the ­desert — in-
tense in their stillness. God be thanked for the earth and its beauty; for life;
for hope — and now at this moment for our safe journey so far.The Henry Mountains and Tarantula Mesa, from the Waterpocket Fold, .Part IV
CANYON COUNTRY
Earth Unmasked
The Capitol Reef landscape challenges and confounds. All that rock, all
those singular plants growing where no plant should find life easy, all those
animals mostly active at night whose lives we rarely encounter.
And so we need the insights and voices of scientists and naturalist writers
to help us understand. Ward Roylance spent his life trying to capture the
Colorado Plateau in words. I include his introduction to his Capitol Reef
guidebook here. Then there is Abbey.
Edward Abbey remains the voice of the canyon country thirty years after
his death in  and a half century after the publication of Desert Solitaire,
his extended essay and elegy for Utah’s redrock wilderness. The short piece
here, written as the foreword to a  book of photographs that I edited,
Blessed by Light: Visions of the Colorado Plateau, is filled with Abbey’s charac-
teristic lyricism, anger, natural history, philosophy, call to action, and self-­
deprecatory humor. He was one of a kind.
Starting with the foundational nineteenth-­century surveys of Lieutenant
George Wheeler and Major John Wesley Powell, geologists have made the
Colorado Plateau a place where fieldwork predictably yields discovery. The
nature of their work, immersed in deep time, tends to make them comfort-
able with pondering the extraordinary.
Writer Charles Bowden revisits Wheeler’s work and does his best to wrap
his imagination around the immensity of geologic time. Writer and photog-
rapher Michael Collier brings us the modern geologist’s voice in an excerpt
from his book about Capitol Reef geology, written for the park visitor.
Natural history writers make crucial companions for us all when we
enter new country. These writers have read the science. As relentlessly ob-
servant wanderers, they have soaked up the spirit of the land and its plants
and creatures — and then turned their experiences into rich and surprising

Part IV: Canyon Country
language. Here, two of the best naturalist writers, Ellen Meloy and Ann
Zwinger — the latter called herself with wry self-­deprecation “the near-­
sighted naturalist” — give us their take on Capitol Reef wildflowers, aspen,
and toads. Last, Ron Lanner, forest biologist and science writer, shares his
enthusiasm for the remarkable coevolved partnership of piñon pines and
piñon jays.
Spend time with the words of these keen observers, and you’ll never
again see the canyons of Capitol Reef as monotonous or barren or “timeless.”
This redrock canyon country is dynamic and alive.
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PARK ()
Ward J. Roylance (–)
Ward Roylance began exploring the canyon country from Salt Lake City in the
s, and after decades as a travel writer he and his wife, Gloria, moved to ­Torrey
in . In the years before his death in , Roylance wrote from his home,
shifting from post–World War II boosterism to concern over the Big Build-­Up of
development in the Four Corners. He published a guide to Capitol Reef (excerpted
here) and The Enchanted Wilderness, a love letter to the Colorado Plateau. His
Torrey home is now a nonprofit arts and education center, the Entrada Institute.
As the essence of a mystic experience — even a taste or smell — cannot be
conveyed in words, so it is with Capitol Reef National Park. Its uniqueness
defies language.
Geologically the Waterpocket Fold, foundation of the park, is not too
unusual in such basic attributes as its rock layers (which are common
throughout much of the Colorado Plateau), or its numberless erosional
forms (which have general counterparts elsewhere), or its dramatic mono-
clinal structure (other picturesque monoclines are in the vicinity). Even the
varied colors of its rocks, while superlative, can be found in other parts of
the Four Corners region.
No, the uniqueness of Capitol Reef National Park lies not merely in its
basic geological constituents, however remarkable they might be. The secret
of its sublimity is in the blending, the polishing, the finishing.

An Introduction to the Park
The Castle and the Henry Mountains, from Panorama Point, .
Any work of art requires raw materials. What transforms materials into
art is some creative force, be it human genius or natural impulse, as well as
a fortuitous combination of those materials.
In the case of Capitol Reef the creative impulse (erosion) has combined
with ideal materials to create a masterpiece of natural esthetics.
Esthetics: pertaining to beauty or the beautiful. Perhaps esthetics is the key
concept in evaluating the park. Its beauty is different from that of any other
place. The park stands in an esthetic class by itself, setting its own distinctive
standard of beauty. There is nothing else like it.
At Capitol Reef nature has taken ordinary raw materials (rocks), painted
in a spectrum of rainbow hues, and shaped them into a work of amazing
erosional intricacy. Maze, tangle and labyrinth are descriptive terms that
are eminently suitable here. So are adjectives such as strange, marvelous,
exquisite, harmonious, majestic — the list could go on without exaggeration.
And what to call the park’s natural forms? The English language is hardly
adequate to describe some of them.Ward J. Roylance

Canyons? Yes, but not merely “canyons.” In Capitol Reef they are
chasms...gorges...gulches...slots...natural phenomena that Webster never
dreamed of.
Buttes? Yes, but in Capitol Reef a “butte” is likely to be a rounded, swell-
ing, doming, swirling object of esthetic perfection. The angular butte named
by Spanish explorers bears little resemblance to the splendid butte-­forms
of Capitol Reef.
Cliffs? Yes, hundreds of miles of them. But in Capitol Reef they are not
merely “cliffs.” Here they have a delightful personality all their own, the
result of rainbow coloring and wonderful erosional designs.
All of this color, erosional intricacy and uniqueness of personality make
Capitol Reef a park for connoisseurs. There is no end to esthetic discovery.
Every change in perspective reveals new forms and relationships. Clouds...
sunlight...moonlight...time of day...rain...snow: every nuance of lighting
and contrast creates new colors, shapes, spatial dimensions. The possibilities
for visual experience seem boundless here.
COME ON IN ()
Edward Abbey (–)
With Desert Solitaire () and The Monkey Wrench Gang (), Edward
Abbey became the literary voice of the canyon country. His ornery prose demanded
that the reader react, and not everyone loved him. But his followers (and his fans
truly were more followers than mere readers) made him the muse of direct-­action
environmentalism, an Old Testament prophet thundering in defense of wilderness.
He called his essays “antidotes to despair.”
Nearly everything Abbey wrote grew from the redrock wilderness. This piece,
Abbey’s introduction to Blessed by Light: Visions of the Colorado Plateau,
distills his voice.
It is difficult to write about the landscape of the American West without
lurching into rhapsody, as the testimonials in this book naively demonstrate.
And probably no part of that landscape has provoked more rhapsodical
prose, purple as the bloom of the sage, than what geographers call the Colo-
rado Plateau province — i.e., the region drained by the Colorado River. For ex-
ample, any author capable of typing such a phrase as “...the light that never
was is here, now, in the storm-­sculptured gorge of the Escalante,” [­ Abbey’s
own words] should probably have his typewriter confiscated, hammered flat,
and sunk in the silty depths of Lake Powell National Sewage Lagoon. With
the author’s neck attached by a short length of anchor chain.
This straining after mystical, visionary, transcendental typing has long
been a source of amusement to critics and book reviewers among our East
Coast literati. (That little clique and claque of prep-­school playmates and
Edward Abbey

Ivy League colleagues.) In the minds of those stern-­disciplined fellows, with
their faces still set toward New England, Old England, central France and the
mud of Mississippi, the extravagant language employed by Western writers
when writing about the American West reveals a softening of intellect, brain
cells addled by too much sun, the lingering afterglow from the sunset of
nineteenth century romanticism.
Could be. Maybe they know what they’re talking about. But they don’t
know what we are talking about. We, that is, who live in the West, love the
West, hate the West, and persist in trying to paint it, photograph it, and
describe its disturbing shapes, colors, and nature through the inadequate
vocabulary of a language that was formed among the vapid bogs and insipid
fuzzy hills of little England.
It cannot be done. The world is bigger than we are, fundamentally myste-
rious — why should anything exist? — and beyond the scope of human expres-
sion. No system of symbols can be expected to comprehend and apprehend
that which is the source of all systems. Nevertheless we keep trying, groping,
searching, feeling our way toward some sort of vision, some kind of under-
standing. In the process we are forced to expand the powers of imagination
and stretch to breaking point the modes of communication. We always fail,
we inevitably look ridiculous. The most heroic efforts lead only to another
painting, another photograph, one more book. The best of these refer, finally,
only to themselves.
Art cannot replicate the natural world — neither the starry universe nor
the voodoo gulches and hoodoo rocks of the canyon country, the high
mesas, the sunken rivers, the corroded cliffs of the Colorado Plateau. But
these failures do not matter. Not if they result in books worth reading, paint-
ings worth hanging on a wall, or photographs that command more than a
caption, more than one passive look. The purpose of art is not replication but
creation — the making of integrated little worlds within the greater world
that encloses us.
Given that understanding, we can proceed to my second argument. It is
not enough to describe the world of nature; the point is to preserve it. It is
not enough to paint, photograph, or even to understand the American West;
the point is to save it. It is not enough to admire or love the Colorado Pla-
teau region; the point is to defend it from its enemies. Landscape aesthetesHalls Creek, the most remote country in the park, .Edward Abbey

are common as lichens on an academic wall. What we need are heroes and
heroines — about a million of them — willing and able to fight for the health
of the land and its native inhabitants.
The world of Glen Canyon, now buried under the sludge and stagnant
waters of Lake Powell, will serve as one good example of what happens when
we compromise away too much. The Mojave Desert of southern California —
smogged over by urbanization, bombarded by the military, devastated by
weekend hordes of mechanical recreationists — is another. I’m hardly think-
ing of “wilderness,” which barely survives in the forty-­eight states, but simply
of back country, primitive country, of land not yet wholly surrendered to
industrialism and industrial tourism. I mean country like the Colorado
Plateau, with its many millions of acres of still roadless territory.
Difficulty of access is the most democratic of screening devices. Anyone
with the price of an old pickup truck in his bank account is free to explore
and enjoy the back country of Utah, Arizona, the Four Corners — few things
could be simpler, easier, cheaper. Dirt roads “lock out” only those people
who fear dust, who cannot cope with a flat tire, who lack the sense to stash a
little food, water, and a bedroll in the cargo space of the machine they drive
and are driven by — those in short who lack, not money, but interest.
The same principle applies to what we loosely call “wilderness,” meaning
an area without permanent vehicular roads. Any man or woman in normal
health, with the price of a pair of walking shoes in his or her pocket, is free
to enter, to wander through, to get lost in, and to escape from the easy-­going
wilderness of the canyonlands. This form of mild adventure has become
so popular now that in many places (such as Yosemite, Grand Gulch, the
Grand Canyon) a walk in the wilds is subject to permits, advance reserva-
tions — rationing.
Which means, to my mind, that we will soon need far more, not less,
official wilderness in our United States. More wilderness or fewer people.
Preferably both.
The human animal needs adventure. Fantasy is not enough. But more
important than our need for open space, physical freedom, occasional soli­
tude, is the need for the land to be let alone and left alone. For its own
sake. Let being be, said the philosopher Martin Heidegger. I can imagine a
civilization wise and generous enough to set aside vast tracts of land where,
Come on In
by mutual agreement, none of us humans enter at all. Ever. A place where
our feathered, furred and scaly-­skinned cousins — as well as the plants and
the rocks — are free to work out their evolutionary destinies without any
meddling or “management” whatsoever.
Another fantasy, no doubt. Meanwhile, we must begin where we are,
with our backs to the wall. Somehow, now or never, we must draw a line
before the advance of commercial greed, industrial expansion and popula-
tion increase and announce, in plain language, “Enough is enough. Thus
far and no farther. Think of your children. Of their children. Of the hawks,
buzzards, lizards, bear. Save a little room and time for the free play of the
human spirit and the wild play of the animal kingdom.”
I can think of no better place to draw that line — in words of flame, in
deeds of conviction — than around the red rock, the sunburnt canyons, the
lonesome junipers and the solitary mountain lion of the Colorado Plateau.
Come on in and see for yourself.
IMPRACTICABLE RIDGES ()
Charles Bowden (–)
Chuck Bowden’s writing ranged from street reporting in Chicago to a string of
harrowing books about the drug trade along the Mexican border to fierce and
quirky natural history writing about the Southwest. This excerpt comes from his
collaboration with photographer Jack Dykinga, Stone Canyons of the Colorado
Plateau, which grew from time in the Escalante and Paria canyons.
Bowden focuses on the Wheeler Survey here, which overlapped with John Wes-
ley Powell’s survey at Capitol Reef in the early s. Some men worked for both,
in sequence, including G. K. Gilbert and geologist Edwin Howell. In his journals,
Gilbert even refers to Capitol Reef as “Howell’s Fold.”
Lt. George Wheeler, West Point class of ’, is probing the edges of the
canyon and plateau country in . He is part of what will become an in-
vasion of scientific Vandals and Visigoths — the expeditions of King, Powell,
Hayden, and of course, Wheeler. Everything here is very old, and for the
men of science all this antiquity of stone is very new. It will not be until the
early s that they will agree on a simple language for their discoveries,
the terms we now use, such as Quaternary, Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic,
and so forth.
Wheeler is smitten, and in  returns with a passel of geologists and
topographers, troops, a photographer, and, of course, a reporter. He is to look
for minerals and coal and anything that indicates money can be made. He
paddles upstream in the Grand Canyon and travels but fifty-­three miles in
twenty-­four days. His ego is good-­sized. Two years after Major Powell and his

Impracticable Ridges
men have raced down the entire canyon country of the Colorado, Wheeler
announces of his midget foray, “The exploration of the Colorado River may
now be considered complete.”
He is part of a breed. While the Saints are putting their faith and lives
on the line to settle their Zion, the scientists are racing each other to cover
as much country as possible — hustling like lobbyists on Capitol Hill, pitch-
ing their wares in the newspapers, sniping at each other often through the
various bureaucracies and agencies that cut their checks. Eventually, he
does the Escalante country and in his hands the place becomes blood red
with Tri­assic rock and is surrounded by a ribbon of Jurassic. His map hosts
wonderful names — Waterpocket Fold is more brutally seen as Impracticable
Ridges, the Kaiparowits is simply Linear Plateau.
What all these ambitious men scamper over is one of the planet’s old-
est and most stable layer cakes of largely sedimentary rock. They invent a
language to record this place and the terms become the keys of the piano
on which they play out their geological concertos: on one section of the
Colorado, in what is now Grand Canyon National Park, the keys are granite,
schists, Bass limestone, Hakatai shale, Shinumo quartzite, Dox formation,
Tapeats sandstone, Bright Angel, Muav limestone, Temple Butte, Redwall
limestone, Supai formation, Hermit shale, Coconino sandstone, Toroweap
formation, Kaibab limestone, Moenkopi formation, Shinarump conglom-
erate, Chinle formation, Wingate formation, Kayenta formation, Navajo
sandstone, Carmel formation, Entrada sandstone, Dakota sandstone, Tropic
formation, Wahweap sandstone, Kaiparowits formation, Wasatch formation.
In other areas there are more keys or fewer keys, but the basic structure
remains the same.
The men stand back and look at the work and think they can hear the
beginning of time itself, hear the thing ticking in the Precambrian rock
too old to imagine and too hard and real to deny. They have named things,
and now, they feel, they know them because of these names. This play often
consumes their entire lifetime. Wheeler himself is broken physically by the
work and retires in .
They are the West we can truly possess. I am holding Wheeler’s Escalante
country in my hand at this moment. It is labeled Atlas Sheet  [which
reaches east to Capitol Reef ] and captures the dust and heat and thirst ofCharles Bowden

the expeditions of  and  in fine lines, reds, greens, oranges, browns,
yellows, and blues. The headwaters of the Paria move very exactly across it
and plunge into Paria Canyon like an eighteenth-­century minuet. The maps
always humor us with their clean order.
But something happens in this hard rock country, even to professional
military officers. Clarence Edward Dutton, Captain of Ordnance in the
U.S. Army, loses himself in the surveys of the plateau country during the
same years Wheeler is roaring about the slick rock. He produces volume
after volume of reports, especially his Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon
District. But science is not enough here. He writes:
Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful or noble
he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would
appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever
might be bold and striking would at first seem only grotesque. The
colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry
and bizarre. . . . But time would bring a gradual change. Some day
he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first
seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which
seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had
added enormity to coarseness have become replete with strength and
majesty; that colors which had been esteemed unrefined, immodest,
and glaring, are as expressive, tender, changeful, and capacious of
effects as any others. Great innovations, whether in art or literature,
in science or in nature, seldom take the world by storm. They must
be understood before they can be estimated, and must be cultivated
before they can be understood.
We inherit this split tradition of rocks we can name and things in the
rocks we can neither comprehend nor ignore. We try poetry, music, photo-
graphs, paintings, drugs, alcohol, novels, tracts, guides. Nothing works. There
are trilobites swishing in the muck, cycads are growing big as houses; it is all
in the rocks, they have left their footprints and we cannot deny them their
existence. This is what our brains tell us is embedded in this ancient stone.
And more. Dinosaurs, yes dinosaurs also, roaring, making big imprints in
the mud, dying and leaving large bones, frightening teeth, huge lizards thatHiker in Sheets Wash, .Charles Bowden

make us shudder, all this is there in the rock. The initial humming is, well,
we really don’t know if it truly is, but we imagine it is some kind of hum-
ming right in the rock, in that oldest Precambrian stuff, the beginning of
our world, the original hard rock cafe, and we reach out and touch it and
the rock is hard and cold and yet somehow it scorches us. Then comes...
well, everything, the entire catalogue of life, something vaster than Noah
could imagine, something more diverse and richer than even his fine rain-
bow could convey. In the rock, you are trudging down a canyon, your hand
moves, it touches and rubs . . . the rock. That is what our science tells us, that
the book of life is right before our eyes, and recorded in what we determine
is cold, unfeeling rock.
We all know this and yet none of us believe it. It is too immense, the
units of time are too large, the imagination required exceeds our minds. But
it seems to be so. We stand on a cliff and look out at the vista and we think
this is beautiful, this is powerful, this is color and texture and a hot wind
on our face, and cool water is running silently across the sands in the deep
canyon below and we cannot deal with the ideas the rocks are whispering
to us. We cannot, no, we really cannot. But here we come face to face with
them and so no matter how long we go away, we always come back. If only
in our dreams. Huge beasts, dead tens of millions of years, are caterwauling.
A mountain bike zips past, the rider encased in modern fabrics. I’m warn-
ing you, don’t come into this country for a vacation. It will take more. Ask
the people rolling those wagons down toward the river to found that new
settlement, the people with their children, their ducks, their chickens, their
livestock, their musical instruments, their faith. It will take much more than
you can give in a vacation. You will be back, I’m sorry, but you will be back.
The beasts in the stone will beckon you, the humming of the deepest rock
will wake you in the middle of the night no matter how far from this ground
you roam. Fair warning has been given. It is not simply one more place. So
we must come back for something we truly cannot name and we come back
to a place we cannot really describe — even when we have memorized all
the strata slowly humming with billions of years of energy under our feet.
THE NEVERLASTING HILLS ()
Michael Collier
From his base in Flagstaff, writer, photographer, geologist, pilot, and physician
Michael Collier has explored the West for forty years. This excerpt comes from his
 book for the Capitol Reef Natural History Association, The Geology of
Capitol Reef National Park. “Some people think of science as sterile,” Collier says.
“Some people think of rocks as inanimate. But I can’t write about or photograph
a place without having some sense of relationship to it.”
Geologists are fond of leaning back, laying their hands across their bellies,
and pronouncing that we can never really appreciate the full extent of geo-
logic time. It stretches back too far to be truly understood. Nothing in our
short lifetime can prepare us for the immensity that is measured in billions
of years. There is a professional smugness here: the contemplation of time,
we are being told, is the geologist’s turf.
On the other end of the spectrum, faced with events that have occurred
in a historic time, a geologist is likely to say that we can’t really put them
into perspective; we don’t know if this flood or that rockfall was a fluke of
nature or a true sign of the changing times. His feet are propped up on his
desk now; he is nodding sagaciously and relighting his pipe. You see, it’s all
done, not with mirrors, but with the sliding scale of time.
On the nd of September, , a flood raced down the lower Fremont
River, submerging most orchards and fields that lay alongside its banks.
The Mormons had met and risen above adversity before, but this was dif-
ferent. The rules had changed. Starting with that single cataclysmic flood,
Michael Collier

the Fremont began to entrench itself into a previously shallow meandering
course. The small washes that feed it were suddenly spurred to slice open
deep arroyos — one tributary to Sandy Creek, previously an insignificant
wash, is now walled within a channel forty-­five deep, seventy feet wide. The
Mormons’ small dams across the Fremont repeatedly silted up, and their
irrigation ditches were choked with silt when they ran at all. Water supply,
always a problem along the erratic Fremont, became undependable; the
groundwater table dropped. Church records show that the  population
of the lower Fremont valley was  persons. Seven years later it had fallen
to . The capricious land had driven out almost a third of its inhabitants;
one hundred and fifty more would leave over the next twenty years.
With the flood of , a cycle of erosion had begun along the drainage
of the Fremont. The arroyos are apparently still cutting deeper into their
beds. Tentacles of erosion creep further into the as-­yet undissected flatland
above the arroyos. The entire Southwest has been caught up in a regional
version of this frenzied erosion since the s. Is it due to overgrazing, or
to a drop in the whole region’s water table, or to climatic changes? No one
knows. The lesson we learn is that the earth lives by its own cycles, its own
rules. Processes that we observe now may have operated in different fashion
or at different rates in the past. Cycles of erosion. Cycles of glaciation. Cycles
of mountain building. The geologist’s sense of perspective is nothing but a
gambler’s ability to play the odds. He knows that in the end the cycles will
all average out. In only this sense is the present a key to the past....
Erosion on the other hand is the process whereby the products of weath-
ering are carried away by wind or water. Grains of sand, particles of clay are
airborne on every breeze, and are sent downstream with every passing rain-
storm. Show me a storm-­fed wash on the Colorado Plateau and I will show
you muddy water. Wind is capable of reshuffling loose sand on the surface,
but it is water which carries out the greatest work of erosion.
Hiking on a hot summer afternoon, it is admittedly difficult to imagine
yet another agent of erosion: ice. Glaciers covered the top of Boulder and
Thousand Lake Mountains in the not-­so-distant past, perhaps as recently as
, years ago. Striations and grooves on Boulder Mountain indicate that
most of its ice flowed to the south, pushing rock and rubble down as low as
, feet above sea level. A lobe of glacial outwash near Fruita left basalt
boulders twelve feet in diameter littering the banks of the Fremont River.
The Neverlasting Hills
Basalt boulders above Deep Creek, looking toward Thousand Lake
Mountain, .
Lakes were gouged into the top of Boulder Mountain, and were trapped
behind the ice-­inspired rockslides on its east flank. These too are the legacy
of the glaciers.
Earlier, three characteristics that usually shape the results of erosion on
the Plateau were listed: aridity, uplift, and flatness. We can now consider a
fourth: the varying hardness of individual strata. The Mancos Shale is made
up of alternate members of sandstone and shale. The shale is easily eroded,
forming gray slopes. The sandstone resists erosion, forming cliffs that protect
the underlying shales. As Dutton noted, erosion focuses its attack not on
level ground, but against edges, against the cliffs and ledges.
By and large, the San Rafael Group is made up of soft shales and siltstone.
It is more easily eroded than the underlying Glen Canyon Group with its
resistant sandstone cliffs. As erosion strips down through this country, the
Navajo and Wingate sandstones tend to linger above the landscape just a
little bit longer than the other strata.
To the west of the Waterpocket Fold, small streams wander across the
Moenkopi and Chinle formations as if confused, disoriented. When they
reach the orange wall of the Wingate Sandstone, they pause a moment,
thwarted. Then the Tapestry Wall at the head of Capitol Gorge funnels theseMichael Collier

streams into a purposeful plunge, headlong through the Fold toward the
low deserts to the east. Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, erosion
had not had a chance to cut down to this level. The Moenkopi and Chinle
were still buried here; the wall of Wingate Sandstone did not stand above
the countryside as it does now. Lazy streams meandered across the top of the
Fold. But in time, the Chinle and Moenkopi were eroded relatively quickly;
streams able to cut only narrow canyons in the Wingate and Navajo were
able to erode out the broad valleys we see today in the Triassic shales on the
west side of the Fold.
Deep, Sandy, and Halls Creeks all flow along the east side of the Water-
pocket Fold, parallel to it, mainly through the soft layers of the San Rafael
Group. If these creeks were to cut straight down from their present positions,
they would soon be bedded in the harder Navajo Sandstone. But by a sleight
of hand, they have so far managed to evade the Navajo. Instead of cutting
straight down, the creeks find it more expedient to cut down and to the
east, thus the stream beds shift east to precisely follow the Fold as it dives
into the earth. At its Narrows, however, Halls Creek was caught off guard;
its meanderings were trapped within the walls of the Navajo Sandstone.
Gilbert describes the Narrows: “The traveler...can follow the course of the
water and be repaid for the wetting of his feet by the strange beauty of the
defile. For nearly three miles he will thread his way through a gorge walled
in by smooth curved faces of the massive sandstone, so narrow and devious
that it is gloomy for lack of sunlight.” Such is the fate of streams and travelers
in the Navajo.
The Navajo Sandstone, where it is tilted and exposed along the Water-
pocket Fold, is intricately sculpted into a myriad of slot canyons, rounded
domes, and free-­standing arches. The walls of the canyons are sheer, rising
hundreds of feet before rolling back to the domed terraces on top. The
bottoms are softened by sand amidst the slickrock, carpeted here and there
with maidenhair fern and columbines. These canyons are the gems of the
Waterpocket Fold. It would be worse than pointless to direct you to the
three or four “best” side canyons of the Fold. Nothing can replace the sense
of discovery that follows one’s own explorations. Go look, and you will find
your own canyon within the Fold.
A friend and I once walked up Deep Creek, north of the Fremont River.
We saw no one else; as usual in winter, Capitol Reef National Park wasHalls Creek side canyon, .Michael Collier

empty. When it was time we turned up into the Fold and camped beneath a
ledge at the top of the Navajo. Winter’s chill was upon us; even so I couldn’t
resist jumping into a pocket of water just downstream from our camp.
I should have known better.
The next morning we walked up into the heart of the Fold, the heart of
the Navajo. A storm had cornered us under an overhanging arch. I would
have played my flute to hear its echo on the surrounding cliffs. But I don’t
play very well and at my friend’s insistence, had left the instrument back in
the car. Instead we watched the rocks and listened to the rain.
Rivulets coursed across the slickrock, down paths well worn by rains
before. We were within a wide amphitheater — the walls vertical, its floor by
giant steps leading back to the narrow canyon that had afforded us passage
half an hour before. Beyond the canyon we could see out to the Hartnet
and South Desert where we’d been hiking two days earlier. There lay the
San Rafael Swell and the gentle slopes of Moroni. An immense and solid
country I thought, remembering the words of Gregory in the s [Herb
Gregory, eminent Colorado Plateau geologist in the generation between Grove
Karl Gilbert and Charles Hunt]. But lowering my gaze to our amphitheater, I
knew it also to be beautiful and delicate. It’s all done with scale, both in time
and distance. I thought of the rain trickling over the sandstone in front of
me, and of the eons-­long erosion of sedimentary rocks a mile thick. I looked
at a small swirling convolution in the block of Navajo at my feet, formed by
gravity before time had cemented its sand grains into sandstone — and then
thought of the much larger Fold, thousands of feet high, ninety miles long.
Time and distance are the dimensions of geology. To study the geology
of Capitol Reef is to consider the sum of an infinite number of small events.
The science of geology is like a telescope — held one way, it makes its object
seem larger; held the other way, the earth becomes vanishingly small. To
dryly report that the Navajo Sandstone is  million years old, is to reduce
reality to a hatful of numbers. But to examine its age grain by grain is to
appreciate the true width and breadth of time. This perspective we gain
through the eyepiece of geology. It will grace the life of anyone with the will
to walk and the heart to listen.
The rainstorm never did amount to much. We walked back down to
camp.
A FIELD GUIDE TO BRAZEN HARLOTRY ()
Ellen Meloy (–)
Ellen Meloy’s first book grew out of repeated trips through Desolation Canyon
with her river ranger husband. Her subsequent books rippled outward from her
home in Bluff. Meloy’s thoughtful musings about Colorado Plateau natural history
while she wanders the Navajo Sandstone of Comb Ridge in Bears Ears National
Monument apply equally to the Navajo Sandstone spine of the Waterpocket Fold.
This excerpt from the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Anthropology of Turquoise
introduces her wry humor, her scholarship, and her eloquence.
For reasons that are not entirely clear I have always believed that love and
restlessness are inextricably bound to a desert plant called cliffrose. The as-
sociation might sound more plausible in temperate or semitropical places —
all those sweaty, hothouse colors, the rising sap, the deep-­throat orchids,
roses with their beads of dew and libidinous landscape of lips and folds.
In contrast, desert flora are sparse and ephemeral. There are spines, thorns,
uncertain seeds, long periods of dormancy, and, when moisture comes, a
passion of flowers so accelerated, you feel their demands on your heart, the
mounting pleasure, the sweet exhaustion.
I first wallowed in botanical eroticism years ago, when the long, cold
winters of my Montana home propelled me southward to cheat. By chang-
ing latitudes I could begin spring early. Beyond the northern Rockies’ hard
grip, the Colorado Plateau deserts were warm and soft, already engaged in
rampant foreplay. The business of every plant, tree, and creature was the
Ellen Meloy

business of reproduction. In those years as a seasonal gypsy, on long hikes
down canyons and across open mesas, I wandered through the fecund glory
and tried not to eavesdrop. I committed Victorian acts of science: counting
petals, defining shapes and symmetries, sorting the petiole from the pappus,
the basal rosettes from the pinnately compounded. I indexed my brain with
genera and spilled Latin names onto the Halgaito Shale.
The wildflowers taught me color, not lipstick or wall paint or inner-­self
color, but all the colors possible in a panorama of polychromatic reds held
under a dome of azure sky — papery white prickly poppies, blue-­violet flax,
firecracker-­red penstemon, the crimson spark of paintbrush amid silver-­
green sage.
The pages of my plant identification book wore thin from keying. My
eyes lost focus in the dense undergrowth of footnotes. My sketchbook filled
with portraits of rocks and plants. Next to the sketches of Anasazi pottery
sherds and pinyon pine cones were notes like “Sinuous canyon, drowning
in light. Navajo Sandstone? Entrada? Walls like flesh. The slickrock holds me
in feverish thrall and the grip of inertia . . .‘you who beneath his hands swell
with abundance’ (Rilke).” Or, on sojourns that coincided with a relationship
in which I clung to a rather obsessive, unrequited love, “Datil yucca. Yucca
baccata. Curled fibers on the margins of swordlike leaves. Center stalk with
creamy blooms. Fibers used by the Anasazi for sandals and paintbrushes,
roots used for shampoo. Liquid as slick as soap beneath a coronet of spikes.
Extreme pleasure is a form of self-­immolation, desire its leash around the
neck. Do not bother to resist.”
In no time scientific inquiry fell by the wayside. Phrases like “pubescence
of the leaves subtomentose or tomentose” brought out a blush instead of a
dictionary. I abandoned field guides, lists, and, near water, clothing. I spent
a great deal of time lying down on dunes of coral red sand, shaping myself
to the slip face and its crop of silky white and pink evening primrose. On
one spring sojourn I mixed camp in a field of purple scorpionweed with a
decision about marrying the man in my life, a very sound, un-­unrequited
love. There was little doubt in my mind what all these plants were up to,
their wild, palpable surge of seduction best absorbed by the undermind — no
categories, no labels, no conscious grasping but a kind of sideways know-
ing. Spring in the desert grew beyond the reach of intellect and became aDesert paintbrush and cryptobiotic soil crust — the living shield woven by
micro­organisms that stabilizes, fertilizes, and prevents erosion, .Ellen Meloy

blinding ache for intimacy, not unlike beauty, not unlike physical love. Even
though I moved away from Montana and now live in the desert full-­time,
each spring still carries this craving, this weight of bliss.
And, here on the Colorado Plateau, once again the orb has slipped. The
Northern Hemisphere tips away from the cold. The season is turning and,
in my neighborhood, the lavish scent of damp sand, the upsurge of chloro­
phyll, the birds that mate in the air above our heads — all of it makes us
slightly crazed. It is spring again. I have decided to live inside the sex organs
of plants.
DESERT PAINTBRUSH (Castilleja chromosa):
A low-­lying herbaceous plant with narrow leaves and clustered bracts, or
modified leaves, that resemble a ragged brush dipped in scarlet paint. The
bracts, not the flowers, bear the showy red. The flowers, as thin as eyelashes,
lie hidden in the bracts.
At a distance the land clings to its wan winter brown, fired by the orange
and maroon forests of leafless willows along the banks of the river below my
house. Close up the colors come as fragments, as tendrils of green against
red sand or onyx bibs on the throats of meadowlarks that change their
guttural tchuck into the throaty melody of breeding season. The red-­winged
blackbirds, too, have traded winter songs for mating arias and flaming-­red
epaulets. Only days earlier their shoulder feathers were dark and drab. How
do they grow the red?
. . . On a clear, calm day I hike up the tilted sandstone spine that knifes
through the desert, the ridge of my winter quarters, where I brought moods
and crayons and watched  degrees of broken desert in the ever changing
light. A month has passed since my last visit. I missed the thaw, the shift from
frozen water and dormant wood to a softening so full that the ridge itself
could have swelled and doubled in size if I didn’t know better.
On the ridge, spring’s colors break out of the sandstone like a hulk-
ing seed bursts from a pod too weak to contain it any longer: aquamarine
lichen, the fresh, sweet green of single-­leaf ash, a scattering of cryptantha
with blooms the color of the inside of a lemon skin, and, in sinuous folds
of slickrock, wildflowers in electrified red: paintbrush.
A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry
The desert paintbrush is the queen of slickrotica. You can tell by its fiery
scarlet and early bloom, as if it wants these curvaceous sweeps of sandstone
to itself before the wildflower season’s full Baroque. Paintbrush is partially
parasitic on the roots of other plants. Underground, it invades the vascular
tissue of another plant and absorbs its nutrients. Sometimes paintbrush
nudges up seductively close to the host, a flashy scarlet starlet in pickpocket
position.
In contrast to places where soil is abundant and deep — and to the neigh-
boring Great Basin’s bowl full of alluvium — the Colorado Plateau desert is
earth unmasked. Weather and time remove detritus as small as sand grains
and as large as hopes for a few inches of soil. On sedimentary strata with
little or no veneer, plants like the paintbrush take purchase. They must adapt
to different parent materials, fix their roots into substrate that varies in type
and hospitality within a few hundred yards. Some plants take to sand and
gravels, others to shallow silts or clay. “Edaphic endemism is rampant on the
Plateau,” says a statement about as tabloidesque as a botany text will dare.
In other words, the range of certain endemics, or flora limited to specific
localities, is often determined by soil conditions.
Paintbrush grows in tucks and folds of canyons and amid pinyons and
junipers on the high-­elevation mesas. A tall, gangly Castilleja with red-­
orange bracts prefers stream bottoms, springs, and other wet places. Paint-
brush genera spread themselves from Wyoming to New Mexico and eastern
California to Colorado. But many of them slip their lives into bare-­boned
sandstone. The paintbrush becomes attached to its homestead. I interpret
this as affective as well as physical and take them on as allies. I admire their
loyalty to dirt.
Red is common among early bloomers, as if nature wished to jump-­start
spring, to skip the formalities and lunge into an unfeigned passion that dis-
solves reason or reluctance. Red is the color of attention. Red flowers sear
retinas made weary by winter, by snow or the season’s low, angular light.
The color prepares you for the wings of a bluebird, the shimmering violet
throat of a hummingbird, sunrise in bands of pollen yellow....
Castilleja produce nectar twice a day, when insects and birds are most
active. Midday the pollinators rest. I am on the ridge at midday, greedily
hoarding the red. The sun illuminates the paintbrush against blond rock.
Red is the color of martyrs, blood, hell, and desire. It quickens the heart rateEllen Meloy

and releases adrenaline. The rains and this electric flower promise more
red — and every other color — to come. I make a vow that each day will have in
it a jewel like this one, knowing well that the desert bloom is not so much a
season as a moment, given then lost. I am ready to live inside this paintbrush,
but I cannot climb in. I am stuck in the ecstasy of anticipation....
CLIFFROSE (Cowania stansburiana): A small evergreen with gnarled trunk
and shaggy limbs that carry five-­lobed, resinous leaves. For most of the year
it is unremarkable. (If you do notice it, you end up counting leaf lobes, one
of the few features that distinguish cliffrose from its look-­alike, bitterbrush,
Purshia tridentata.) For a week in early summer, however, dense clusters of
blossoms engulf every branch and twig until they fully conceal the leaves
and the cliffrose looks like a pale yellow torch.
Cliffrose often prefers slickrock and shallow dry washes, where the em-
brace of low-­slung rims on either side provides not so much shelter as a
degree of difficulty, perhaps, to match the cracks and soil pockets in which
they grow.
The first time I heard a Navajo say the word gad I thought it referred to a
deity. Instead, it is the word for juniper, the omnipresent tree that grows
atop mesas and in folds of wind-­smooth sandstone across the Colorado
Plateau. From juniper seeds Navajo mothers made their children bracelets
of “ghost beads” to prevent bad dreams. The hard, fragrant berries bear one
of the desert flora’s scarce displays of turquoise. Fallen, they surround the
juniper in a blue-­green skirt. Here with gad grow companion pinyon pines,
single-­leaf ash, Mormon tea, and, on the slickrock ledges above a heart-­cleft
canyon, a scattering of cliffrose in bloom.
Creamy yellow flowers cover the branches from shaft to tip, drowning
the small leaves in petals. The trunk’s bark is brown with a silver cast, shred-
ding in thin dry strips. Each flower has the broad, five-­petal bowl typical of a
wild rose and a crown of golden stamens in the center. I sit under a dazzling
mass of roses in a breeze that is nearly a wind. It gusts, then subsides with
rushes of sound like airborne surf.
Bees in the cliffrose fill the quiet parts of the gust rhythm. They are delir-
ious and so am I. The cliffrose fragrance envelopes us in a spicy musk that is
stronger, yet more delicate, than the water-­heavy perfume of Russian olive.
A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry
It incites blatant acts of sensuality. Other plants prompt reactions that are
aesthetic, intelligent, or herbal. Not cliffrose. It conspires with the sweep of
slickrock on which it grows. It is nondescript when not in bloom, irresistible
when it is. Sit by one and your heart will open and desire will flood into the
emptiness created for it.
From this tree other cliffrose follow fissures in the rock in a somewhat
orderly direction — the creases offer more moisture and soil than the acres
of bare sandstone — but four or five more pale torches escape the line and
erupt in different places, so there are cliffrose everywhere until the land
drops off into the sheer space above a deep, deep canyon, and, below my
high perch, meets the emerald-­green crowns of a cottonwood bosque in
the canyon bottom.
Like pale beige sand against turquoise sea, the symmetry of the desert
is calming. Perhaps it is the spaces that are just right, the perfect amount
of air and ground between bursts of creamy torches. Each cliffrose stands
alone — or with a skirt of peppergrass and scorpionweed — and invites me to
consider it the most beautiful, the fullest and most aromatic....
In the years of spring escapes from Montana to the desert, I so often
found myself sorting out my heart. Slowly, the senses had a way of overtak-
ing the mind so that the perfume of cliffrose could push me into a realm
of sheer pleasure. The sandstone was filled with secret veins that only the
flesh could find. Press the stone and feel its flex, I thought, take the shape
of its harrowing embrace. The sun would rise east of my hipbones. Color
struck like blows. The light ratcheted up its blaze and flashed through each
nerve, a net of flame, a field of exquisite friction. I was seized by something
that could never be wrestled down, a feeling not unlike sorrow and ecstasy
compounded. Then came the sweet drift of longing, and I hung on to the
earth’s curve for dear life, breathing the comfort of stone during my ride.
The desert in spring held such vehement feelings that I would take them
north like pollen stuck to my lips and the tips of my fingers and recall a kind
of insatiable rapture — sun blazing on red walls, plaintive cries of pinyon jays,
a slip of jade river, the brazen harlotry of cactus flowers, all of it alluring and
distant. I would walk away from that wild, heady rose, put days and distrac-
tions and the distance of three states between it and me, then, pressed against
memory, the scent would become as Keats said of his lover: “Everything that
reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.”
VIGNETTES FROM THE “THE NEAR-­SIGHTED
NATURALIST”
Ann Zwinger (–)
Ann Zwinger moved with her family to Colorado in . With the eye of an artist
and the patience and attentiveness to detail of an art historian, she fell in love with
the West. She began writing about the places she adopted as her home landscape,
including Run, River, Run: A Naturalist’s Journey Down One of the Great
Rivers of the West, about the Green River; and Wind in the Rock: The Canyon-
lands of Southeastern Utah. Her natural history vignettes and elegant drawings
slipped impeccable science into books for general readers. She cared deeply about
place, family, teaching, story, art, community — and the future of us all.
Zwinger writes of aspen growing in clones, as they do — genetically identical
shoots connected underground by their roots. Aspen clones reveal themselves on
hillsides in fall, turning color at slightly different times, creating a mosaic of green
and gold, each clone distinct in tone. The largest aspen clone of all grows near
Capitol Reef at Fish Lake, a single clonal colony known as Pando, estimated to
cover more than one hundred acres, weigh six million kilograms, and grow from
,-­year-old-­roots, a strong candidate for the earth’s oldest and heaviest living
organism.
Aspen ()
In the deepening afternoon, we cross the east flank of Boulder Mountain
in Utah, between the towns of Escalante and Torrey. We ascend through
aspen thickets, incessant trunks in small, close clones, filigreed with pewter
branches. Around nine thousand feet the thickets coalesce into hundreds of
acres of aspen, clone after clone, Populus populating the world. A lone aspen

Vignettes
in the middle of a knoll, cloneless, with no competition for light or water,
spreads as amply as an oak.
We come here in search of a grove of giant aspen. We find them standing
among boulders of ruddy red and charcoal that stud the bronze-­leafed floor
of the clone. Younger trees are here but stand apart, distanced from these
huge ones whose size and dignity demand space, require deference. They
are not flighty Aphrodite trees, dancing and sparkling, given to frivolities.
These are the Zeus of the aspen grove.
I can’t even get my arms around the boles. Clearly they have well ex-
ceeded their life expectancy of two hundred years, although it’s often diffi-
cult to tell, even from a core, given aspen’s inconstancy of growth rings. In
unglaciated sections of the country, as here, many clones may have endured
many thousands of years. Spared the rigors of Pleistocene ice, they may well
be direct descendants of Miocene- and Pliocene-­epoch clones going back
fifteen million years. The larger, fewer-­toothed leaves of Colorado and Utah
aspen more closely resemble fossil leaves than those of aspen farther north
or in the northeast.
Aspen, Boulder Mountain, .Ann Zwinger

I have no tape measure, so I remove my boot laces, tie them together,
and find them not nearly long enough to go round. I settle for bending
my notebook around the trunk and marking how many times it goes. One
seventy-­inch-circumference bole works out to a twenty-­two-inch diameter;
others have similar girth.
For the first eight feet the trunks are blackened, deeply furrowed and
cracked; above, coal-­black diamonds and lozenges pattern the bark like giant
Tarot cards. Where branches fell they left heavily browed eyes like those of
brooding, monster bulls. Monumental and isolated, the giants stand aloof,
as if enduring so many winters and so many summers sets them apart, ren-
ders them able now to communicate only with others who have seen the
same ancient comets, endured the same cruel freezes, withstood the same
devastating droughts. They gaze somber-­eyed into the distance, the superb
survivors, shrouded in dreams.
Wind in the Rock ()
In damper climates limestone disintegrates easily, but in dry regions it be-
comes one of the most resistant of rocks. Where the finer sediments have
been removed by repeated flooding, ledges of more resistant limestone are
revealed. Water has a tendency to shoot off these ledges or “knickpoints”
during flood, its force scouring out a depression at the foot, which some-
times retains the water for a while.
One such charming pool lies just a quarter mile upcanyon, shaped like
the winged samara of a boxelder. Gentling down to a soft bottom studded
with rocks, the deepest part is maybe five feet. The convex side lies against
a rock ledge, reflecting it in dark perfection. A chute cuts the ledge, and
moisture, outlined with white as always, drizzles down the slope beneath, a
film of moisture that remains and works away at the rock. The walls of the
chute bind a narrow slot of blue sky.
In the shallows of the concave edge of the pool, the silt is as slippery
as pure grease, giving way to a velvety softness in the water, blossoming up
deliciously between my toes. About six dozen tadpoles, one-­inch ­bodies
with inch-­and-a-­quarter tails, snorkel along the bottom, bodies slightly
canted, ­siphoning up desmids and diatoms — minute algae — while their tails
undulate above them. They have fat, bulbous bodies, some already with
Vignettes
r ­ udimentary legs. Their bodies are mostly filled with intestines, of necessary
length to digest vegetative food. When they become adults in July or August,
they will be carnivorous with much smaller intestines, an adjustment of
physiology accomplished in the transformation from tadpole to frog or toad.
As they bustle about feeding, they send up minute clouds of silt, so fine is
the bottom material. Occasionally one rotates and reaches up to the surface,
almost standing on its tail, smacking the air. They move in a rather dignified
and leisurely quadrille. Against their clustered movement tiny water beetles
dash frenetically through the water, disappear into the bottom silt, then pop
out again, like minuscule Mexican jumping beans.
Standing ankle deep in the water, concentrating on the tiny beetles,
I nearly jump out of my skin when a tadpole comes and nibbles on the side
of my foot, a gentle but very unexpected tickle. I reach down to pick it up —
they move so slowly that it’s simple to scoop one into my palm. It wriggles
there, its top the color of onyx shot with gold, underneath gilt and bronze,
encased in a crystalline coating — lovely and soft to behold and to hold, a
small Cellini creation. In the water, when the sun catches the whole fleet of
them, they glint rosy gold. As I stand still, several, like miniature vacuum
cleaners, clean off the thin layer of silt settled across my instep.
Up on the shelf above the pool hunches a small red-­spotted toad. This
silver-­dollar-sized creature seems made of dull jade embossed with enameled
dots the color of garnets. These toads are most likely to be found on rocks
or in rock crevices, taking to water only when disturbed. During breeding
season brown “nuptial pads” appear on the thumb and inner fingers of the
male which helps them to adhere to the slippery body of the female during
mating; eggs are laid singly or in strings on the bottom of these shallow
basins. From April to September, during or after rains and in the evenings,
their trilling adds to the quiet music along the pools and puddles of the
canyons.
FEATHERED CULTIVATORS ()
Ronald M. Lanner
Forest biologist Ron Lanner taught for nearly thirty years at Utah State University.
He has a special interest in the ecological and evolutionary effects of mutualisms
of birds (especially jays) and pines. He says, “A surprisingly large area of the earth
is covered by corvid-­dispersed pines, in North America, Europe, and Asia; yet
their story is little known even to the natural-­history-obsessed public.” His work
for general readers aims to counter that lack of appreciation for this remarkable
relationship, and this excerpt from The Piñon Pine: A Natural and Cultural
History does just that for the raucous world of piñon jays at Capitol Reef.
To the Shoshone it was known as Tookottsi. Early American ornithologists
called it Maximilian’s jay, after its discoverer of , the Prince of Wied.
Generations of Westerners knew it as the blue crow, but today it goes by
the name piñon jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus). By whatever name, it is
not easily overlooked in the woodlands it calls home. It is a large crowlike
jay, dull blue in color, with a short tail, a slender bill, a raucous voice, and
gregarious habits. Unlike most jays, it is highly social; compact flocks of
scores or even hundreds of restless birds may be seen making rapid rolling
maneuvers within a hundred feet of the woodland canopy.
The clinical details of the piñon jay’s life history are prosaic and straight-
forward. Pairs nest from late February to April in nests built in piñon, juni-
per, or ponderosa pine trees. Four to five eggs are usually laid. The nesting
females incubate the eggs while their mates form a male flock that feeds

Feathered Cultivators
Piñon jay, .
together, periodically bringing food to the females. Both parents feed the
newly hatched, naked, slate-­colored nestlings. In a couple of weeks the
young assume a grayish color, including the bill, legs, and feet. After leaving
the nest, they remain drably gray until the fall molt, when for the first time
they assume a bluish hue. In a year or two, after breeding for the first time,
they finally take on the full blue plumage of an adult bird. The piñon jay eats
many kinds of insects, berries, and seeds, including piñon nuts. But the way
it uses the latter is extraordinary and has helped to shape the evolutionary
history of the pine that sustains it.
Late in summer — about the end of August — the seeds of the piñon be-
come ripe. At this time, the cones are still green and pitchy and tightly
closed, but the seeds within have well-­developed tissues and are of high
nutritive value. They are ready to be used. By now, the nesting season is over
and nestlings have learned to feed independently. Yearlings have completed
their postnuptial molt and, resplendent in their new blue plumage, have
fully regained their ability to fly. Thus, the flock is ready for action.
This readiness manifests itself in drama as the flocks wheel and sweep
through the woodlands, harvesting the fruit of the pine. Cones are pecked
loose from their branches and carried to secure perches where the birds
noisily hammer them open and pick them apart scale by scale. The seeds
are removed intact, up to twenty being stored temporarily in the jay’s elasticRonald M. Lanner

esophagus. These seeds are then carried off to the flock’s traditional nesting
area, as much as six miles away, where they are placed in the ground. Typ-
ically, the jay thrusts several seeds into the litter of dead needles and twigs
that makes up the woodland floor. Some are deposited on the south sides
of piñon trees, where deep snow will not accumulate and where snowmelt
will come early in the spring. The caching of nuts continues through the
fall, and as the cones dry and open, the jays are able to continue the harvest
by picking seeds from intact cones still attached to the tree.
Their choice of seeds is neither random nor indiscriminate. Piñon seeds
usually come in two colors: light tan and deep chocolate brown. Tan seeds
in an overwhelming majority of cases turn out to be empty: they consist of
a shell containing only the dried-­up remnants of an aborted embryo, the
common result of an ovule pollinated by a pollen grain from the same tree.
In contrast, nearly all of the dark seeds are filled, and most of the filled ones
have sound embryos embedded in plump white endosperm tissue.
Piñon jays know all about this: they are piñon seed experts of long stand-
ing. They ignore tan seeds, not even bothering to remove them from the
cone. Instead they concentrate their harvesting efforts on dark-­coated seeds.
Here they do not rely on visual cues alone: the piñon harvest is serious busi-
ness and cannot be left to chance. The foraging jay will remove a dark seed
from the cone and “weigh” it in his bill. If it is one of the rare dark-­coated
empty seeds, it will be discarded. But even if its weight measures up, it may
still undergo another test — it may be “clicked” in the bill by a rapid open-
ing and closing movement of the mandibles. Presumably, it must make the
right sound, or it too will be discarded. “Bill clicking” appears to tell the jay
whether a filled seed contains a normal endosperm, or a diseased or resinous
one. Thus, the piñon jay relies on its senses of sight, touch, and sound to
reject seeds that would be useless as food.
The fall ends with the woodland litter concealing thousands of piñon
seed caches in the areas where the jays will breed next spring. Soon courtship
begins, and courting males, chased and beseeched by kaw-­ing females, feed
unearthed nuts to their soon-­to-be mates. After egg laying, the incubating
females subsist largely on uncovered pine nuts; after the hatch, the young
nestlings are also fed the produce of the piñon. Thus is the reproductive
cycle of the piñon jay entrained by the rhythm of the woodland.
Feathered Cultivators
The relationship of the piñon jay and the piñon pine is not one-­sided; it
is clearly a symbiotic one that benefits both parties. The piñon tree accom-
modates the jay in several ways. It not only produces very large seeds of high
nutritive value; it spreads the cone-­opening period over several months,
making those seeds available throughout the fall. Thus, the bird receives a
high-­fat, high-­protein food in large quantities that can be stored for use at a
time when few other foods are available. The concentration of piñon trees in
nearly pure stands allows the jay to accumulate a large volume of food in the
woodland area near where it will breed. The lack of a seed wing, of course,
helps keep the seed in its place on the upper surface of each cone scale until
harvested. In addition, a thin membrane of cone-­scale tissue (spermo­derm)
acts as a small “blanket,” preventing the seed from falling out of the cone by
mere act of gravity. And the tree further obliges by opening its scales widely
to expose the seeds to view and by coloring its empty seeds tan, thus advertis-
ing to the jay that no effort need be expended on them. The advantages that
come the tree’s way are equally important. Because they are wingless, piñon
seeds cannot be carried on the breeze to the areas of bare soil they need
for proper germination and seedling establishment. But seeds harvested by
piñon jays are carefully placed in prepared seedbeds, where some will elude
the jays’ efforts at recovery. These overlooked seeds have a high probability
of surviving and becoming trees.
The connection between the piñon jay and the piñon pine is more than
a bit of curious natural history. It is, in fact, basic to the ecology of both bird
and tree and has provided the dynamic for the evolution of all the piñon
pine species.
First, some ecology. Piñon seeds are big and clumsy things, incapable of
graceful flight on the wind. If left to its own devices, a tree would eventually
drop its seed to the ground beneath its own crown.... In order to germinate
successfully under conditions that rapidly become arid, the seed must be
buried in the moistened soil. How the seed gets there is of no concern to
the tree; but that it gets there is clear necessity. This is where the piñon jay,
and other members of the “seed-­caching guild” come in. By burying seeds
for future use as food and by neglecting to remove all of them by spring,
the jays set the stage for seeds to germinate.Ronald M. Lanner

. . . Natural selection can operate simultaneously on jay and pine, modi-
fying both species in the course of time. It seems likely that jays, by selective
action over the millennia, crafted a form of tree adapted to growth in semi-
arid conditions, whose large nutritious seeds attract the very birds needed to
plant those seeds and perpetuate the trees’ existence. In short, piñons were
invented by jays. The jays still hold the patent — and continue to collect most
of the royalties.Cattle drive, Scenic Drive, .Part V
HOME
Listening to the Desert
Mormon colonization reached Wayne County in the s. Latter-­day Saint
Church leaders sent pioneers into the canyons with the challenge to make
the desert “rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” Those who were “called” by
the Church did their best, moving into the Fremont Valley from the west,
settling first in the fertile flats of Rabbit Valley (in Loa, Fremont, Lyman, and
Bicknell). From this stable base, they seeded communities downstream in
increasingly rugged country, through Torrey and Teasdale to the little oasis
of Fruita at what is now Capitol Reef National Park headquarters.
Deep in the Fremont River canyon, Elijah Cutler Behunin built a house
for his family that still stands. He intended to use the cabin as a base for
grazing his sheep along the Fremont in summertime. Ruby Noyes Tippets,
his granddaughter, pictures what that life was like during the one year the
family lived here full-­time, –. She also tells us what happened to
the tiny settlements downstream toward Caineville, all abandoned early on
when the Fremont River refused to run in a controlled channel, and devas-
tating summer flash floods intensified by uncontrolled grazing upstream
washed away the pioneers’ farms and fields.
The inviting flats where Pleasant Creek pauses before plunging through
the Waterpocket Fold drew the first full-­time non-­Indian resident to the
future park, Ephraim Hanks, in . National Park Service historian Lenard
Brown provides background for Hanks’s arrival. A Hanks son and grandson
remember stories from their family’s homestead. The Hanks place, Floral
Ranch, passed through a series of owners, leading to Billie and Levi Bullard
in the late s, who sold to Lurt Knee in , who created the Sleeping
Rainbow Guest Ranch on the site. Lurt lived at Pleasant Creek until his
death in . I had the chance to interview both Billie and Lurt, and their

Part V: Home
stories here come both from my interviews and from oral histories collected
by historian Brad Frye.
Writer and conservationist Chip Ward brings the story of this foothold
in the wilderness one generation closer. He and his wife, Linda, came to
Pleasant Creek in the s, leasing the Sleeping Rainbow Guest Ranch
from Lurt and Alice Knee for several years. The Wards came from the urban
East and made the startling landscape of Capitol Reef their home. In many
details, Ward’s description of daily chores at Sleeping Rainbow in the s
differs little from Tippets’s descriptions of the Behunin family’s days along
the Fremont River in . The guest ranch is now the Capitol Reef Field
Station, operated by Utah Valley University, and UVU writing classes gener-
ate a steady stream of creative responses to the park landscape.
Wayne County still claims a handful of ranchers, even if they make their
livings as teachers or government employees or builders and run only a
handful of cattle on the side. Since the  designation of the national park,
all but one ranching operation with a grazing permit in Capitol Reef has
sold to nonprofit organizations that have retired the permits. The romance
of the range remains, along with the right to trail cattle through the park in
perpetuity. In “The O-­Bar Drive,” Ray Conrad, Wayne County’s preeminent
cowboy poet, celebrates stock drives that took cattle and sheep through the
park from the summer range of High Plateau meadows to winter range on
the scrub lowlands below the Henry Mountains.
WHITE HOUSE ON THE RIVER ()
Ruby Noyes Tippets (–)
Born in Torrey, Ruby Noyes Tippets loved researching and reimagining her ­family
history. She describes the stories in her book as “legendary,” but “based upon facts
as they were given” to her. Her curiosity must have been infectious, as her son,
Don Fowler, born in Torrey in , became a distinguished historian and an-
thropologist.
Tippets’s mother, Nettie Noyes, was the fifth child (of thirteen!) born to Elijah
Cutler and Tabitha Jane Behunin (called Cutlar and Jane in her story here). In
this narrative of her grandparents arriving at the bend in the Fremont River where
they built their home in , Tippets describes a visit to the Behunin cabin by
Butch Cassidy. The outlaw who made Robbers Roost famous was born Robert
Leroy Parker to a Mormon family in Circleville, ninety miles west of the park. For
years, Cassidy rode through Wayne County to visit his family in Circleville on his
occasional commutes from his desperado life east of Capitol Reef. Stories abound
of his connections to Capitol Reef, including a log hideout in Grand Wash reputed
to be an overnight refuge and the inscription described here by Tippets, carved on
the back of the Behunin cabin.
Jane was so tired that she felt as if every turn of the wagon wheels made
an impression upon her back. It was not good, she told herself, to get this
tired. She was forever reminding Cutlar and the children to keep the Word
of Wisdom and here she sat so completely exhausted that she could not
hold her head erect. Since baby Lila’s birth she had never been well and she

White House on the River
wondered with a feeling of lassitude, if she would ever be able to hurry as
she once had done.
Cutlar had been excited about this move to a new claim up the river
from Notom, and had promised her a large and beautiful home of white
sand rock as soon as he could get it built. The older girls had looked search-
ingly into the tired eyes of the mother and she had sighed to recall the many
times which her husband had made these rash promises. Cutlar had always
hoped for a wonderful home for his big and hungry family, but each time
he got one room finished, he seemed to put off building more for them.
The gray and cream colored ledges of this area were breathtaking in
beauty and the river meandered along its quiet way through the valley. One
could see almost any color he looked for in this remote and secluded place
and the hues of a kaleidoscope were to be seen. Indigo, pure shades of purple,
ochre, sienna, red, amethyst, and heliotrope blended into intricate forms of
the sandrock and here in a place where the valley widened, Cutlar brought
the wagons to an abrupt stop. Jane’s head jerked upright and she quickly
glanced at the sleeping baby to see if she were awakened by the jerking of
the springseat.
The baby opened her eyes and yawned. “Well, Janie, here we are!” ex-
claimed Cutlar; “Here we will have the most beautiful home in all of Utah
Territory. The rock lies waiting to be quarried and time wastes...let’s get
unloaded.”