The Plateau Palaver features semimonthly interviews and commentary from featured writers, thinkers, and doers throughout the Colorado Plateau and the West.
Only the beginning in Recapture Wash
By ANDREW GULLIFORD
Justice has been served. Last month two Blanding men received $35,000 in fines for building an illegal ATV trail on BLM land in Recapture Wash just east of Blanding. Their fines represent a multi-year investigation by BLM special agents, but it’s only the beginning of a long process not the end. Much work still needs to be done in San Juan County, Utah. Let’s start with local attitudes.
Whatever possessed these men to think that it was alright to build seven miles of illegal trail straight down Recapture Wash by cutting 300-year-old juniper trees and damaging Ancestral Puebloan sites? To the shame of other law-abiding Utah citizens, these men broke federal laws, including provisions of the Archaeological Resources Protection and the National Historic Preservation acts. They didn’t bother checking with the BLM to get a permit, they just forged ahead moving rocks, installing culverts and even building a small bridge. I know because I walked the route and photographed the damage in November 2007.
Environmental groups came to the defense of the small canyon and for their troubles, Great Old Broads for Wilderness recently received serious threats. The illegal trail had been officially closed by the BLM with signs posted at each end of the route. On the signs someone placed posters with a skull and crossbones and the words “Great Old Broads for Wilderness wanted dead or alive in San Juan County, Utah.”
Now the San Juan County commissioners seek to have the illegally constructed ATV route approved as a county right-of-way by BLM. But not so fast.
First off, there are estimates of over $100,000 in damage to archaeological sites. Who will pay for site restoration? Then there’s the issue of environmental damage to Recapture Wash. A full environmental assessment needs to occur. In the meantime, BLM should maintain the current closure.
County commissioners have repeatedly stated that they want the canyon open for tourists and visitors. As a San Juan County taxpayer, I’m sympathetic. There aren’t a lot of jobs near Blanding and if tourist dollars can help the motels and restaurants in southeastern Utah, sure, why not? But let’s do it right. Let’s have some long-range planning and give serious thought to how to open a remote area and not have it clandestinely pot-hunted.
I’ve hiked Recapture Wash and it’s a beautiful, close-knit canyon with a stream, a few beaver lodges and an intact riparian zone. Ancestral Puebloan habitation sites and ancient stone granaries line both sides of the canyon.
A sunken great kiva resides on a small plateau and it’s easy to see why the Anasazi lived and farmed there. For a quiet day hike it can’t be beat.
Lemonade can come from lemons. Though the illegal ATV trail is both an archaeological and environmental tragedy, the opportunity now exists to do it right.
It’s time for citizen involvement and a shared vision of how this slice of public land can best be managed and interpreted for the common good. Isn’t the historic Mormon heritage of Utah about cooperation and working together?
Perhaps those pioneer values should be reinstituted.
If the San Juan County commissioners really seek increased tourism near Blanding, then why not support a national monument? It’s a small, pristine little canyon that perfectly fits the definition of monument status because of both its natural and cultural resources. Now there’s a goal we can work towards.
© Andrew Gulliford
Andrew Gulliford is a professor of Southwest studies and history at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu
Mine Over Matter
The price we pay for ‘cheap’ energy
by Mary O’Brien
Here’s one small, stark example of our ongoing descent into coal hell. As staff with Grand Canyon Trust, I deal with management choices by the three national forests in the southern half of Utah. One of those forests, the Manti-La Sal, includes large deposits of coal.
Perhaps you heard of and remember the Crandall Canyon mine collapse in 2007, which killed six miners and three rescuers. That was on the Manti-La Sal NF. Mine owner Robert Murray, who had previously and was subsequently fined for mine safety violations, blamed the mountain: “Had I known that this evil mountain, this alive mountain, would do what it did, I would never have sent the miners in here. I’ll never go near that mountain again,” he said.
In fact, the mountain had collapsed because Murray was hollowing out its innards. The miners were working for him 5.6 miles in from the mine entrance. The longwall mining Murray was ordering is a form of what is called subsidence mining, because mountains, being mountains rather than being evil, subside into mine cavities. A longwall panel of coal that is being mined is typically 1-2 miles long and 750-1,200 feet wide.
Now it’s 2009. There’s a new Manti-La Sal NF proposal for longwall mining, called the Greens Hollow Coal Lease Tract, with the final decisions to be made by Bureau of Land Management (which leases mines on national forest lands), U.S. Forest Service (which approves leases), and the state of Utah (which gives away water rights).
The Greens Hollow Coal Lease Tract is adjacent to three other coal mines on one particular district of the Manti-La Sal NF. Mining within the nearby Pines Coal Lease Tract recently resulted in E. Fork Box Creek, several springs, and wetlands on Wildcat Knolls disappearing down cracks after the mountain sunk down toward the mine void. Peatlike wetland soils on the plateau shriveled. Wildcat Knolls holds one of only two year-round, struggling greater sage grouse populations on the Manti-La Sal NF. Greater sage grouse are candidates for federal listing as a threatened or endangered species because grazing, oil and gas developments, and other developments have depleted their populations.
Now the Manti-La Sal is proposing to build 15 miles of pipeline to bring water from Quitchupah Creek up onto the dewatered, stressed Wildcat Knolls, to provide two 15 by 15-ft. fenced wet spots for sage grouse to use and 11 water troughs so cattle can eat the plants sage grouse need for food and cover.
In its environmental document for the proposed new Greens Hollow coal mine, the Forest says upper Muddy Creek, where the federally threatened Colorado cutthroat trout swims, might be dewatered. Oh, and the dozen springs that are connected to wetlands on the plateau might disappear — forever. Oh, and also, the mine will drain an aquifer of 7,000 year old water.
The coal will then be burned, increasing global warming, which will raise temperatures and increase droughts on the same plateau that may be dewatered by the mine.
Some mountains just don’t know how to take care of themselves.
Mary O’Brien is the Utah Forests Project Manager for the Grand Canyon Trust. A public interest scientist since 1981, Mary coordinates the Three Forests Coalition’s efforts to obtain greater care for native wildlife, vegetation, and ecosystems on southern Utah’s Dixie, Fishlake, and Manti–La Sal National Forests. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, and Castle Valley, Utah. This article was first published in the Eugene Weekly.
A Surprise on the Grand Canyon’s Swamp Ridge
by ED MEYER
Synchronicity! That’s the word that described what had just happened to Kathy and me on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Events are synchronistic if they relate to one another, but the odds of them happening at the same time are very remote. That’s what had just happened!
Since moving to Kanab in 2005, I had become a huge fan of the great Western writer Zane Grey. Grey’s writing career skyrocketed after his trips to the Utah-Arizona border in 1907 and 1908. His experiences in the area provided the inspiration for Heritage of the Desert, his first successful novel; Riders of the Purple Sage, the most famous Western of all times; and more than a dozen other works. His word pictures of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon create some of literature’s most beautiful images of the natural world.
Kathy and I were driving on the infrequently travelled dirt roads of the Kaibab National Forest and the Grand Canyon National Park on that day for two reasons. First, it was late September and the fall colors of Plateau’s aspen forests were at their most brilliant. The contrast of brilliant yellow and orange aspen leaves framed by the green and blue ponderosa pine and blue spruce background create a world class experience. Secondly, we were travelling along the Swamp Ridge road to a point overlooking the Muav Saddle. Discussions with the local old timers suggested that Zane Grey had camped in the saddle during his trips to the North Rim in 1907 and 1908. Since location had never been documented for Zane Grey fans, I was excited to see what I would find. Zane Grey’s camping party included Jim Emmet, Jim Owens, and a man named Buffalo Jones whose history was key to the synchronistic event that was about to occur.
We were approaching an area where the ponderosa forest slopes down gently to the north. There was little undergrowth so the forest floor was open and carpeted intermittently with low growing wild grasses. As I neared this area, I slammed on the brakes of our Ranger and whispered to Kathy, “Look. Do you see it?” In the middle of the road was a huge beast. “What is it,” she asked. “A bull?” Actually she wasn’t wrong. It was a massive bull buffalo that looked at us briefly before beginning a disgruntled walk downhill.
Within moments it seemed like the landscape came alive as twenty more buffalo began followed the bull in what was soon a rumbling trot away from the road. Though on a miniscule scale, I couldn’t help but remember Zane Grey’s description of buffalo herds on the move in The Thundering Herd, “Then her ears seemed to fill with a low murmur or faint roar . . . like the rumble of distant thunder… She had heard about the rumble of an earthquake and for a moment felt fear of the mysterious and unknown force under the earth. But this was a moving sound that came on the still summer air. It could be made only by buffalo.”
So here’s where the synchronicity comes into the picture. Kathy and I were on the way to a site where Zane Grey camped with Buffalo Jones. Jones had been a buffalo hunter who repented in his later years. President Teddy Roosevelt recruited him to oversee the buffalo restoration project at Yellowstone after which he purchased several buffalo from the Goodnight Ranch (you may recall that Goodnight was one of the two heroes in Lonesome Dove) in Colorado. These buffalo were relocated to the Kaibab Plateau for an ill fated effort to crossbreed buffalo and Galloway cattle. Eventually the buffalo were sold to the State of Arizona and turned into the wild. Kathy and I had stumbled onto the descendents of Buffalo Jones’ buffalo herd…synchronicity at its best!
So does the story stop here? Not quite. Kathy and I returned to Kanab the next day and I googled “Grand Canyon buffalo” to learn a little more about these beautiful creatures. I was surprised to learn that the U.S. Park Service, the organization that ironically has a buffalo on its emblem, was struggling with whether the buffalo belonged in the Grand Canyon National Park. There were concerns that there was no historic record of buffalo on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Another issue was whether these were purebred buffalo or whether their genes might have been tainted by cattle. I pushed my chair away from the computer, frustrated, annoyed, and perplexed. Kathy and I have seen perhaps the most beautiful wild creatures of our lifetime in world class natural environment. Why would there be concerns about the animal that graced the back of the buffalo nickels I once hoarded to buy cinnamon candy at the corner market?
Then, for some reason, the California condor came to mind. The huge bird has been reintroduced into the Vermillion Cliffs in 1996 to the dismay of local ranchers and thunderous applause of the environmental community. Why had the condor become the darling of the environmental community when the Grand Canyon Buffalo were under attack? I slid rolled my chair up to the computer and here’s what I learned.
Condors and buffalo co-existed along the Grand Canyon roughly 10,000 years ago during Pleistocene Epoch. In fact, the condor relied on bison carrion and the decaying bodies of other large mammals to live. As the climate changed, these large mammals disappeared as did the condor that fed on them. Both animals eventually returned because ancient rock art depicts both huge birds and bison-like animals along the Grand Canyon. In the case of the bison, one panel shows them being hunted by men on horses with bows and arrows. Since horses were introduced by the Spaniards in the 1600s, there must have been buffalo in the area during historic times. However, being a game animal, it appears they were hunted into regional extinction. The condor survived longer, most likely because they were not as tasty as buffalo. However, it’s interesting that biologists tie their resurgence to the introduction of herds of cattle, horses and sheep into the region by, of all people, ranchers. Condors hung around until the early 20th century when they were no longer able to co-exist with humans who shot them, poisoned them, or destroyed their eggs. The introduction of telephone, telegraph and power lines into the area also contributed to their demise because the big birds had a habit of running into them. The bottom line then seems to be that there is evidence bison and condors along the Colorado River in both pre-historic and historic times.
Now let’s look at the re-introduction of both animals to the area. American bison were re-introduced by Buffalo Jones to Buckskin Mountain and the Kaibab Plateau in 1906. It’s likely the species of buffalo was somewhat different from prior times since the animals were imported from the Great Plains, but they prospered even after Jones sold the herd to Arizona. One of the reasons Jones sold the herd was he couldn’t get buffalo and cattle to breed. Since their release into the wilds, buffalo populations have grown as the huge beasts have learned to survive in the natural environment. In fact, you can buy a buffalo hunting license in Arizona to shoot the big beasts if you can find them. The reintroduction of buffalo to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon has to be considered a huge success.
California condors were re-introduced to the Vermillion Cliffs in 1906. The big birds were almost assuredly a different species from those of former days, but at least they were the same genus, Gymnogyps. One report indicates that 14 of the original 35 reintroduced condor died. They once again struggled in their efforts to co-exist with humans. Condors still run into power lines and still suffer lead poisoning from feeding on carrion shot by humans with lead bullets or shotgun pellets. They also die from confrontations with eagles and coyotes. The condors have not yet demonstrated the ability to live naturally in their current environment. They are fed carrion daily by human attendants. Their reintroduction may yet be successful, but the jury is still out.
As for me, I’ve come to two conclusions. The first is that the environmental community is sometimes fickle when it comes to wild animals. The second is that success breeds contempt. One thing is certain though. Kathy and I will always remember that magnificent moment of synchronicity on the Grand Canyon’s Swamp Ridge.
Ed Meyer ran Utah’s rural economic development programs for five governors before retiring to Kanab, Utah, where he is now a city councilman. In his spare time, Meyer’s passion is researching Zane Grey and his relationships in Utah. He and his wife Kathy enjoy camping on Grand Canyon’s North Rim.
Previous Posts:
A Mountain Meadow, by Mary O’Brien
Thinking About the “Moral Call of the Wild” by Brooke Williams
The Environmental Movement’s Most Published and Least Acknowledged Author by Ed Meyer
