ROUGHING IT ON THE BOUNDARY:
SEARCHING OUT THE GRAND CANYON’S WEST END
The protective boundary between Grand Canyon National Park and Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument ought not exist. The Grand Canyon lands in the entity Lake Mead National Recreation Area east of, above, the Grand Wash Clilffs ought to have been reconciled with the National Park long ago. The north side hinterland of the Grand Canyon drainage is comprised of the north, upstream sub-drainages of Parashant, Whitmore, and Toroweap Canyons, all important in the approach to, and the explanation of, what goes on in this middle section, heavily volcanics-inflected, of the Grand Canyon. This area has remained under BLM administration as part of the Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument. Were this stew of four jurisdictions (see BLM Arizona Strip map below) administered and treated together, the easy, thorough, public presentation, comprehension, and perception of the Canyon would be the natural over-riding goal. Separated, the four are problematic cooperators in protection and presentation policies.
Elsewhere in this blog, I tell the stories of how these complicating boundaries came to be. In November, I experienced their impact directly by spending a few days with colleagues on the area’s roads and tracks, mostly in a vehicle, with some time on foot. In this and accompanying posts, I am trying to come to grips with what we saw added to what I can interpret from on-line documentation in the important matter of these hindering boundaries; how they affect what we see and know.
In an accompanying essay, I wrote about questions of naming — who or what gets memorialized, and what that means for how the public gets to understand the landscapes we travel through. These are fundamental matters for administering and interpreting these lands we treasure in the National Park System and its cousins.
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR; HOW DO WE SEE IT
The Canyon’s start at the Paria junction is dramatic, rising up quickly from the flats at Lees Ferry, to climb steeply, exposing the Canyon’s strata to the down-river traveler.
There is less drama at the Canyon’s end, 277 miles down-river. Its high rim reaches a final pinnacle at 6251’ elevation (thus a couple of thousand feet below the Canyon's maxima), its Westernmost High Point (WHP). It drops off that rim then to wander the middle level, here named the Sanup Plateau, before running down an unnamed ridge to the Colorado River. The start at the Paria is very well-known and travelled; the Canyon’s western ending is more like the poetical whisper instead of a bang, and I am fairly certain little known and little visited. So lets start by looking at a googelmap aerial as if from way high.
Rising up from the Esplanade on the right side is the dark igneous top of the Shivwits Plateau, running south (off the map) to Kelly Point. The Plateau stretches west-northwest under the less dark cover of the Kaibab Formation, ending beyond the Grand Canyon drainage with the rounded northwest edge of Snap Point.
The Canyon mainstream comes up from the map’s middle, carving its way toward and through the west wall of the Grand Wash Cliffs. In between these two well-marked features lie the tan and red of the flattish Sanup, its edges incised north and south by side canyons, named and unnamed. (A map of Arizona will locate this northwest piece of the state.)
Lets overlay that view with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Arizona Strip map showing administrative/political jurisdictions.
The orange wedge is the Hualapai Indian Reservation, south of the Colorado River, so not of concern here.
The purple is land administered by the National Park Service (NPS), north of the Colorado under two administrations: 1. Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) on the south. 2. Then in pieces, the brownish boundary line trying to follow the topography, is the eastern end of Lake Mead National Recreation Area (LMNRA). Those pieces, as a further complication, were included in President Clinton’s designation of Grand Canyon - Parashant (sic) National Monument (GC-PNM).
Blue sections belong to the State of Arizona; white ones are privately owned.
Most of the yellow shown(Bureau of Land Management) is designated part of GC-PNM — its boundary is another brown one shown way up near the top. This Monument continues off the map northwest, outside of Grand Canyon territory. I have emphasized this by drawing a green line along the actual drainage divide between Grand Canyon tributaries and those washes that flow away from the Canyon west through the Grand Wash Cliffs.
Lets take a journey along that divide (my green line) bounding the Grand Canyon Drainage. In the big, mostly yellow, western area, we follow Parashant Wash and its tributaries (e.g. Salt House) up and then down southward as they wander and turn on Shivwits Plateau top. In the somewhat chaotic area to the west, the Grand Wash Cliffs are eating their way east. The nomenclature might confuse: Snap Canyon and Snap Point are western features of those Cliffs, their ultimate destination the Basin and Range country. Snap Draw is an easterly heading branch of Parashant Wash, spread more placidly over the upper Grand Canyon lands on the Shivwits.
As we move southwest, the drainage divide is a kind of flattish ridge between those Snaps and the Parashant at about 6200’ elevation. We find ourselves slightly rising to 6360’ as we move out onto and down along a narrowing peninsula, our principal destination: THE GRAND CANYON’S WESTERNMOST HIGH POINT, (WHP). It is in the upper right corner of the google aerial below.
Moving down this mile-long finger (or snout), on our left looking east is still the Grand Canyon: Dry Canyon is close, then comes its neighbor, Tincanebitts Point.
On the WHP’s west, the view looks down 800’ on the broad little-inflected Sanup Plateau, edged on the map’s north by Pearce Canyon as it digs its way west through the Grand Wash Cliffs on into Lake Mead. Although we often speak of the Canyon as going down to those great faults, they are not part of the Canyon — they are the drop that marks the end of the Colorado Plateau province.
The Canyon itself dies away in the jumble of the washes making up the west face of the Sanup above the river. To get there from the WHP, we move southwest across the Sanup (see the green line in the BLM map above) and in short order reach the mainstream rim, where the drainage divide goes along the clifftops of the unnamed side canyons above the Colorado, until it has to go north.
The map below enlarges this last section of rim, running north and marked by the blue line. (Yes, the flatland to the right ,and not in the Canyon, drains to the northeast and into Pearce Canyon and eventually Lake Mead.) That line reaches and just edges out along the arrowhead shape, then drops, moving about and down the ridge edge searching out a passage from the Sanup rim to River Mile 277, at the north end of that yellowish line marking land’s edge on river left.
The particular line I have drawn seems like an accurate one, but possibly a closer look might shift it, for the map's lights and shadows of the ridge high points may not be reliable. Coming down right near R.M.277 is a plus. Of course, since nothing is identified here, the Great Namers now have another opportunity: — to distinguish that little draw and ridge with a name that appropriately marks the quiet, non-spectacular culmination of this grandest of canyon journeys,
The Grand Canyon: from its Start at a riffle rising into a roar, then rampaging and sliding 277 river miles to this, its End in an intricate falling whisper.
Well, except.
There is a small piece of the western Canyon (and GCNP) end squeezed out beyond the Hualapai’s west boundary. I think of this piece as the turkey wattle, a place Ive never visited. My blue line above shows the divide’s start after crossing the river and ascending the ridge that marks the Grand Wash Cliffs eastern top above, to the east, Cave Canyon. However, on the BLM map above, the green line is drawn along the full length of the “wattle” to show the western ridge line of this last major side canyon, named Cave, for Rampart Cave. This line is what should have been used to define the Grand Canyon National Park boundary, instead of the somewhat daft west-end Park boundary we chose (in ignorance) that includes, on both sides of the river, arbitrary pieces of Lake Mead country — an error that may perhaps be rectified by tidier minds of the future.
SOME TIDYING UP, HOUSEKEEPING, AND EMPHASIS
My green line divides GC-PNM into two. The division highlights the Grand Canyon (Parashant) proposal then-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt had in mind in the late 1990’s. As he told me in an interview for this blog, he wanted to protect the drainage of the Canyon. This is the same idea the Sierra Club had when we first advocated a “complete” National Park in 1966. However, the 1998 Babbitt proposal then got swelled up (in non-public meetings) in order to serve the goals of re-wilding and wildlife protection — good goals, but they blur Babbitt’s original vision. Indeed, if we separate the wildlifers' north-west half-million acres, it might appropriately be named the Grand Wash Cliffs Wildlife Protection National Monument. I ignore them here. Concentrating on that part of GC-PNM within Grand Canyon’s drainage would actually strengthen the designation, presentation and protection of the western Canyon.
Whether we call our defining concept for Grand Canyon its “drainage” or “watershed” or whatever, it has limits. First, the large tributaries, Cataract-Havasu, Little Colorado River, and Kanab have only a bit near each of their mouths in the Park, and of these, only Kanab from Snake Gulch down would ever be eligible for further Park expansion. Second, lands on the plateaus the Canyon cuts down into, are going to have problematic boundaries, given how much of the actual plateau lands have non-Park uses. Such boundaries always stir argument about topography and land use. Third, Navajo, Havasupai, and Hualapai landowners go their own way. Of course, advocates of the Grand Canyon can wish for a world where cooperation and appropriate like-minded ideas of presentation and protection would lead the four land-owners to work together in order to celebrate the entire Grand Canyon as the world-wide environmental icon our imaginations and knowledge know it to be.
Coming back here to my subject of the far western Canyon, what I am writing about is the North Side (or Arizona Strip) Grand Canyon Drainage. Referring back up to the BLM map: to start with, the GC-PNM proclamation from the east runs pretty close to the Drainage line.
Starting at the Kanab Plateau (off the map) it takes in upper Toroweap, the Canyon’s most prominent volcanics-drowned side canyon.
Next it covers the southern end of the Uinkarets (south of Mt. Trumbull) Plateau to include the lava flows, those east-going, and those west into the Whitmore drainage.
Further west, the drainage spreads out and is defined by the branches of Parashant and Andrus Washes.
My green Drainage line and the GC-PNM diverge as the latter takes off northwest toward the wild blue yonder of the Grand Wash Cliffs and a wildlife-centered protection area, no longer “the Grand Canyon”.
A REPRISE ON NAMING; A JOINT EFFORT?
We could take advantage of many places along this route that have no or uninteresting Grand Canyon-connected names. An easy one to pick out is what I have called the WHP — the Westernmost High Point, a place it is way past time to elevate into the consciousness of visitors and Canyon lovers for its most emphatic and curious shape (What dragon is it that fetched up here?). A possible choice is Chuarumpeak, the Paiute man whom J.W.Powell relied upon for much information in the 19th century.
Once the ending ridge from the Sanup down to R.M. 277 is determined, it is an obvious candidate for an arresting label.
I have mentioned the five nameless side canyons on the north side of the river as it nears its end, and also freshening up such yawns as “Dry”, “Twin”, “Surprise”, or “Suicide”. “Kelly”, “Amos”, and “Price” out on the longest Shivwits peninsula might have some importance, like Mt. Dellenbaugh. However, a thorough, informed survey might help to make sense of how to tie names into a more detailed interpretive scheme for the Canyon’s west end. It is remote; it is almost a point destination; perhaps an association dedicated to the area and how to present and comprehend it could be inclusive of all the interested parties.
Next: "004. Trimming the Turkey's Wattle"
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