Defining the Canyon's west exit and end

THE GRAND CANYON'S WEST END AND ITS EXIT

Names Matter For The Canyon

In 1973, when we were building the legislation that became the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act… No, wait.

Yes, that was the name at the start. However, the 1972-5 struggles over the original bill wrought change so significant that I think it important, in this 50th anniversary of its enactment, that we correct Public Law 93-620’s name. We cannot do it in law, but we can do it in use, and we should, to honor and adjust our view of what was in fact accomplished.

Yes, the Park was enlarged, its acreage doubled, though significant parts of the Grand Canyon on federal lands could not be gathered in. At the same time, and in the same scrimmage and scuffling that shaped the legislation, the Havasupai achieved, after almost a century, a measure of redress and appreciation, and saw their designated lands, their Reservation, enlarged from a bit of Havasu Canyon to a 180,000-acre swath of Grand Canyon. Much of its plateaus and canyons south of the Colorado River had been theirs for the many centuries before the use, the law, and the government of the conquerors had deprived them of this home, spread across the Coconino Plateau from the Hualapai lands out over the Plateau’s eastern cliffs. 

This successful enlargement, long desired and struggled for, needs to be recognized in the Act’s short title. Section 1 should read Grand Canyon National Park and Havasupai Reservation Enlargement Act. It would have been wonderful and unimaginable had that been accomplished in time for the 50th anniversary of the legislation’s enactment, January 3, 1975.

Anyway. Let’s call it the 1975 Enlargement Act. Here is the official map, numbered 113-20, 021 B, and dated December 1974, showing the double enlargement that should be celebrated as such.

 

So back to what I was saying... 

When we were putting this 1975 Enlargement Act together, there was some discussion about the location of the upstream boundary. Some wanted Navajo Bridge; some Lees Ferry. These man-made locations were rejected for a most natural one, that place on the Colorado River at which the Paria joins it — not lawyerly precise, but completely meaningful as a natural starting point. It also was in line with the Act’s purpose of including in the Park 

(1) the entire length of the Canyon, and 

(2) the Colorado's water surface across to Navajo and Hualapai land on the left bank so that there would be a single uniform administration of and jurisdiction over river traffic by the National Park Service located at Grand Canyon.

What we did not do, however, was to be as scrupulous at the downstream, western, end of the Canyon. Usually thought of as being at River Mile 277, that point is at the mercy of human re-definition and re-measurement. The Grand Wash Cliffs (GWC) are commonly described as marking the end of the Canyon, but that great north-south feature actually embodies more, the change from the Colorado Plateau to the Basin & Range geologic provinces. 

 

Moreover, as I have written about elsewhere, mistakes were made, out of ignorance, in drawing proposed Park western boundary lines, in that they included lands, as with the actual GWC, that do not drain into the Grand Canyon itself, but flow west. Indeed, some of the boundary is located as if the level of Lake Mead would never fluctuate and always be the same huge lake. On both north & south, the lines chosen include a mish-mash (especially the southern turkey wattle) of canyon that go off away from the Grand Canyon's drainage. Here is a depiction on the US Geological Survey National  Map:

Pearce Canyon and Snap Point on the north side of the line and, on the south, the westward drainage of the GWC, are not within the Grand Canyon’s topography The boundary map thus gives a false impression of the actual Canyon. With the extraneous lands left out, a more accurate natural boundary (black line) would look like this:

This line removes from the Park land that drains from the Grand Wash Cliffs on the south and Pearce Canyon on the north that flow away from the Canyon west into Lake Mead. Instead of going up to arrowhead-shaped Snap Point, the Canyon topography turns its boundary south, following right along the rim of the Sanup Plateau. Then, turning east it finds its way along the subtle divide from Pearce Canyon. The line swings up from the main gorge rim to reach and run along the west edge of the westernmost high plateau of the Canyon itself, a point that would be graced being renamed for the nineteenth-century Paiute, Chuarumpeak, who helped John Wesley Powell when he was working on what is now the Arizona Strip.

Charmingly, the topography about Mile 277 happens to include two noticeable features: a north bank butte, the southerly one   climbing up from the river to run along the divide between Cave Canyon on the east and the Grand Wash Cliffs' slope on the west. So at the river itself, the exit is well defined (yes, by the current line as it crosses the river) by the north butte I think could be called (but in Paiute language), She Waves Farewell.