004. Trimming the Turkey's Wattle

 IF ITS RED, ITS EMBARRASSMENT

The GCNP segment on the river left, south, should be colored red for embarrassment—mine.

On the November trip, that segment certainly was a canyon too far, although it certainly is the bona fide western end of the Canyon on river left. indeed, I have not talked to anyone who has checked out the entire length of the north-south ridgeline that divides the Grand Canyon drainages on the east from the washes running west into Lake Mead country. Looks like an uplifting hike.

This south west end, the Cave Canyon complex, is distinguished by the existence of the once-impressive & knowledge-producing, but now severely fire-damaged, Rampart Cave some 600’ above the water. Here is the area overview: 

And the aerial, annotated in red: 

In the upper right corner is the Westernmost High Point, the dragonhead, with the Sanup Plateau spreading out west of it. The long north-south red line starts at about R.M.277, then runs to the left of the Grand Wash Cliffs ridge that is the west bound of the Grand Canyon on the south. The actual final side canyon, just to the right of the red line, is short, while to the right of that, dark shadow on the right wall, is Cave Canyon, with its head washes way up on Hualapai land — the boundary start of which is marked by the short line at the river which, extended, shows that most of Cave Canyon is inside the Park’s turkey wattle, along with flats to the left of the long red line that are not in the Grand Canyon and do not belong in the National Park. So how did they get there?

Guilty. Of ignorance. 

As the fight to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon wound down in 1968, the Sierra Club was approached by staff of Senator Case (of New Jersey!). The Senator was impressed by the Canyon, especially inspired by a wonderful passage in J.B.Priestley’s Midnight on the Desert that urged us all to be proud of being on “the staff of the Grand Canyon”. The Senator wanted to join by introducing a bill to expand the National Park along the lines of the Sierra Club proposal.

Our original Club conception of 1966 had been refined and adjusted so that, including no Reservation lands, its boundaries were a straight-line approximation of the divides that put the Canyon’s side canyons and plateaus in the Park. Senator Case requested the National Park Service to draw up a map for such a concept. 

SIERRA CLUB 1969 CONCEPT AND PROPOSAL FOR

A “COMPLETE” GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK 

(Outline map, drawn by N P S in June 1969 to accompany bill introduced as S. 2977 by Senator Clifford Case (Rep., N. J.) on 1 Oct 1969 to embody Sierra Club idea of “a Park as complete as it could be”. Appears with text and reactions in my blog entry of 11 May 2012: “A Complete Park III: Plans and Discussions”).

I will re-stress here that in 1969 no one involved in our work on expanding the Park had been in this way-out-west area. The detailed topographic quadrangles we now have were only then being worked on by the U.S.G.S. The plethora of maps created since 1970 has certainly been stimulated by the efforts first, to beat down the dam idea, second the subsequent Park boundary expansion (1975), so that, third, we now have all sorts of explorers, wanderers, racers, visitors and what-nots going through the country accumulating (and writing about) the kind of knowledge that would have led to a more suitable Park boundary — one, that is, tied more adequately to Grand Canyon’s features and to the idea that the map representations matter because they have so much to do with a correct apprehension and comprehension of all the variety and extent of the Canyon.

Perhaps one day, Canyon-friendly adjustments to the boundary line will be made. Certainly then-Secretary of the Interior Babbitt made a fine effort in the late 1990’s, even if the Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument (the Canyon’s fourth Monument designation!) that resulted did too little by including too much, confounding some big, important concepts.

With this essay, I wind up this real, map, and imagined excursion to the little-visited Far West of the Grand Canyon. There is, if I am right, much to be done in investigating and discussing in order to select and officially designate appropriate names that point up the western Grand Canyon’s natural history and human history. And much to entice visitors, much to visit in land-reverencing ways, to get a sense of how the 277-mile-length of this unmatchable place comes to its gentle end in our current not-so-gentle epoch. However, Anthropocenic though this age may be, wandering the Canyon using any respectful means can still inspire, test, and teach — that is, after all, why so many of us  worked so hard over so many years (and still do) to grace America’s National Park System by including within it as complete a Grand Canyon as possible.