That was another route Robert found, or RE found there in Marble Canyon, near the
camp where the dam-building explorer types were just upstream from Redwall Cavern. As he was hiking up on his 1983
south-side hike, he noticed that the Redwall kind of sloped a little in this particular place. So when he got to
it, he thought he'd look at it to see if there was a route there. Well, he went down this canyon or little chute
and suddenly there was about an inch "I" bolt imbedded in the Redwall. That made him think, "Well,
maybe I'm onto something!" He went down a little further and there was another one and then there was a cliff,
but a little ledge going off to the right, and he worked his way over there. Then there was a series of iron poles
in the Redwall about three feet high about every twenty feet or so. They had a ring on the top that a rope, presumably,
had gone through, and there were remnants of the rope when I was last there. He went down that route to the river
and I mentioned it in Loops II as a route to the river in an emergency. There is certain danger, certain exposure
to it, so it's an interesting route.
Quinn: Are you aware of any route on river right between South Canyon and the Redwall break above Little Nankoweap?
You've done that?
Steck: Uh-huh.
Quinn: Was there any break through there?
Steck: Yes. Oh, South? Wait a minute.
Quinn: Between South Canyon and Little Nankoweap.
Steck: Yes. I was going to mention that as one of the NEW routes that's been discovered in recent years. This is
in Bridge of Sighs Canyon, and the Bridge of Sighs is at 36.7 Mile Canyon, something like that. And on the 7½-minute
map, it's marked as Bridge of Sighs. This particular time, which I think was around the middle eighties, Emslie,
was doing a study for a thesis on the condors in ancient Grand Canyon, and he was looking in all the Redwall caves
for condor remains. What they would do, I guess, is explore by boat to locate the caves, and then they'd somehow
get back upstream and climb up to the Redwall and then rappel into the caves. So there was one cave there in this
Bridge of Sighs Canyon.
The person that is credited with the discovery, Dawson, was looking up and saw some driftwood way up. "Boy,
that's awful high for driftwood!" So they went and rappelled down to it and found what I've come to call,
or what Gary Ladd calls, the Wormhole route. So you get down into this canyon a little ways on the south side,
and then you contour around to the north side, and get on a little ledge that takes you along the Redwall a little
ways to a cave that's about that wide and maybe about that far up off the ledge. You crawl in there about twenty
feet, and then the cave splits and you go off to the right to a little room about ten feet in diameter perhaps,
and there's a hole in the floor--it's not exactly round, it's sort of vaguely elliptical--so you're not going to
fit in it, unless you get on your side. And you aren't going to go down it unless you've gotten on your left side,
because it's a spiral tunnel, and your knees only bend one way, so you have to go in such a way that your knees
are bending the right way.
Quinn: How do you get the packs through?
Steck: Oh, you don't. I guess you could. We lowered day packs, but I've never had a pack down there. There's smoke
in these caves. You go down about maybe fifteen feet in this spiral tunnel to ANOTHER cave, and then you get back
out onto the wall. You've still got about seventy-five feet of severe Redwall down-climbing to get to the bed of
this little Bridge of Sighs Canyon. Then you go down it, and you still have a little more technical stuff, a little
more chimneying to do before you eventually get to the river. But it is a route through the Redwall to the river
in Marble Canyon in that Bridge of Sighs Canyon. It connects to the rim on river right in the Canyon just upstream
of Buck Farm, which I call Mitchell Canyon in honor of Ron Mitchell who was first to pioneer a route through Marble
Canyon. Then presumably you would cross the river there and there's an easy route back up to the top of the Redwall
on the other side. Then you go downstream a mile-and-a-half to Tatahatso Wash, and you can get to the rim of the
Canyon there. So this is proposed by Dawson and his father as a cross-Canyon route that would have been used by
the ancient Indians.
Quinn: When you did the length of the river through there, where did you have your water caches?
Steck: We had one in this Mitchell Canyon that I mentioned--I think it's 36.7 Mile--and one at Buck Farm, because
in both of those canyons you can get from the rim to the top of the Redwall without too much effort. See, in 1977,
which was the first long hike I made from Lees Ferry to Lava Falls, we carried the water caches down to the Esplanade.
We had almost four gallons apiece that we carried down. But then I thought the next time when I went through there,
in 1982, that it would be better to hike on top of the Redwall. So we carried all the water down to the top of
the Redwall.
Quinn: So the first time through, you were just about river level there?
Steck: No, this particular section from South to Nankoweap, you can't get along the river, so one time I was on
the Esplanade and the other time was on the Redwall.
Quinn: The times that you hiked along that route, the Redwall, or below there, was there potential for potholes
if it were the right season--water pockets--or could you really count on that?
Steck: There is access to the river opposite Tiger Wash, and that's upstream of South. Between South and Nankoweap
you have this route, the Wormhole route, and you have the spring at Saddle Canyon, and that's about it. That spring
is way up at the base of the Coconino, so it's a long haul. If you're going to get water from it, you're going
to have to allow time to get up there, especially if you're traveling on the Redwall, top of the Redwall, because
you've got to go all the way up through the Supai and Hermit to get to it. So my advice for traveling through there
is to use this Wormhole or carry caches down, and carry a lot of water with you. It's not all that far, you've
got twenty-four miles to go, as I remember, from South to 49.9, which is the fault you finally come down at to
get back to the river. So in four days, that's six miles a day. Over that kind of country, six miles is not an
easy day.
It was funny, on the second one, when we had been on the Redwall, we got down to the river [at] about 1:30. Remember
now, we'd been AWAY from the river for four days. So we're down at it finally, and you're looking at it and you're
playing in it, even though it's so cold, and you're looking at the beautiful view upstream, and just having a good
time, sort of like being "home" after a long time away from home. Twenty minutes after we got there,
this boat comes by and somebody stands up in the bow of the boat and yells out, "Is there anybody there named
Steck?" Said, "Yeah! There's two of us. Which one do you want?" "Well, I'm bringing some beer
to George Steck." It turned out, I should have remembered this, but when my son Stan was going to Stanford,
he rented a room from a guy named Walter Garms [phonetic spelling]. One time when I was calling Stan I got Walter
on the phone by mistake and we talked and it turned out that he was going to make a float trip down the Colorado.
I said, "Hey, what time?" He said what time. "Oh, I'll be there about that time." "Oh
yeah, really?!" I said, "Yeah, bring me some beer." (laughter) We were just--TWENTY minutes! If
we'd been twenty minutes later, we would have missed him. Ever since, we've celebrated Walter Garms Day (chuckles).
Quinn: Over the years, have you had a favorite brand of beer?
Steck: No. Well, Robert's favorite brand was Carling's Black Label, which as far as I can understand was the least
expensive beer that he considered drinkable. I thought he liked it! Well, maybe he did, I presume he liked it SOME
anyway. I'd keep some here in the refrigerator for Robert when he came by. I perhaps might have pleased him better
if I'd gotten some other kind, but that's what I got him. I enjoyed Black Label and it had the advantage, maybe
when a case of Bud or something more usual was selling for eight to ten dollars, Carling's Black Label was selling
for five or six. So there was a financial reward to drinking it.
Quinn: How much beer did he drink in a week?
Steck: When he was home, I think he was probably borderline alcoholic. He drank enough so that he had trouble sleeping.
But how much did he take on a trip? Not all that much I guess. But there'd be some in all the caches. Let's see,
did I say he died in 1984? It might have been 1989, that's about right, [that] I was making a big loop from 150
Mile down to Tuckup and back and around, and along the way I found a pair of Levi cutoffs and underwear and some
socks and a can of Black Label. I THINK those are all Robert's things. The shorts were about his size, certainly
the underwear was his size, twenty-four or twenty-six or something. I think it just fell out of his pack. The last
time that I know that he was there would have been around Christmas of 1983. It was after he'd finished his long
hike but before he killed himself, and I think it just fell out of his pack or something. I found it, if it was
1984, it'd be five years later. Of course the bottom was all rounded out from the pressures generated in mid-summer.
It was right out in full summer sun, not too far from Havasu Creek, opposite Havasu Creek. And the question was
[was the beer] drinkable? There's a simple test for that, but you have to wait. We had to wait until we got it
to the river, and then we had to wait maybe an hour for it to get properly chilled, and it was fine. It lasted
that five years, assuming it was his, in great shape.
Quinn: When you guys hiked the Little Colorado, how long did you spend doing that?
Steck: Hiked the length of the Little Colorado from Cameron down to the River?
Quinn: Yeah.
Steck: I think it was probably five or six days from Cameron to the river, and then another couple of days, let's
say nine altogether, to get back out the Tanner Trail.
Quinn: Did you try the Blue Springs water, drinking that?
Steck: Yes. I was there just a couple of months ago, June. We hiked down to it via Horse Trail. Horse Trail is
a pretty nice route, takes you to the Little Colorado four miles upstream from the Great Blue Spring. So we spent
two or three nights at the spring, I guess it was two nights. Gary got VERY sick, vomiting, and just felt terrible.
Quinn: From the water?
Steck: Well, we wondered. We all drank it. There were five of us, and the other four of us drank it and it did
not affect us the same way at all. So we think he had like a twenty-four hour flu. But just to wonder, I brought
back some samples for testing. Another thing, just UPstream of the spring there was a small flow down the LC [Little
Colorado] and there were little fish, an inch long, little minnowy things, just swimming all up a storm. Every
once in a while, one relaxes, perhaps, zigs when he should have zagged, and he ends up swept down into the area
by the springs. So you see quite a few fish there with their mouths up at the surface gasping for air. There were
also some dead ones. So you wonder what's killing them. My view was dissolved carbon dioxide in the water from
the spring, because it had a faint fizzy taste to it. It turns out that I'm very likely wrong, because the samples
that we brought back when they were analyzed had, quote "sublethal quantities of copper" [unquote], in
the spring water. One of the effects of copper poisoning is to interrupt the oxygen transport in the blood. So
these fish could conceivably be starved for oxygen because their blood isn't transmitting it anymore because of
the copper poisoning. So that would seem to be a more valid reason for their dying. There were other things in
the water, but they were more normal.
Quinn: There's a section in the Redwall part of the gorge where it can fill up wall-to-wall with water and so you
don't want to be there at certain times of the year. Did you have any experiences with that?
Steck: Yeah. You know those lizards that can walk on water? You see movies of them and they're just running lickety-split
across the top of the water with their flat feet and they don't sink into the water. Well, that's what you do when
you come to these places, you run flatfooted across the sand just as fast as you can so that you aren't in any
one spot long enough to begin to sink into it. We had our packs on. They probably weighed fifty pounds let's say,
and I'm almost two hundred pounds, unfortunately, so that's 250 pounds. And it's wall-to-wall, otherwise you wouldn't
be doing this! (chuckles) I mean, you wouldn't be running across the ponds so to speak. That was on the most recent
trip. Earlier, when I hiked the length of it -and I forget when that was, it might have been as long ago as 1990
-there wasn't so much of a problem because there was no flow down the drainage from Cameron. There were some soft
places, but nothing that could be considered a hazard.
You know, something about that trip, too, that was interesting -that's 1990, let's say -we're going along through
the brush, and there was one place where there were several of us going ahead through the brush and you see our
heads along the top. This one fellow, John Southrey [phonetic spelling], suddenly had a flashback of seeing a
similar scene in 1982 when he was at the bottom of the Tanner Trail. He had come down with a friend, the friend
had gotten serious blisters, and he finally put him on a boat back to Phantom. John was sitting there watching
the river in the gathering twilight, and he sees these heads going along through the brush on the opposite side
of the river. He's wondering not who they were, but how did they get there, and what are they doing there. He finally
decided that it was a boat party that had stopped and was scouting for one purpose or another. Well, he was telling
me about this at the time of the flashback, I just had this vision of seeing people across the river. It was very
strange. I said, "Well, when was it that you saw that?" He said, "Oh, the permit was from so-and-so
to so-and-so, it probably would have been around the 21st of September, 1982." I said, "Well, you know,
I bet that was I." I looked in my journal, and sure enough, on that very day, I had been on the other side.
So there was that resurrection of the past, that accidental discovery, that he had been watching me eight years
before.
Quinn: Did you have other entry or exit points in the Little Colorado gorge? Did you do Blue Springs Trail?
Steck: I haven't done Blue Springs. Part of the plan was to go look for that trail on this last trip. But it was
SO hot, and Gary--who can generally be counted on to generate enthusiasm for adventures of that kind -he was so
sick that he wasn't about to do that. So I looked over there as to where I thought it might go, but that was about
it.
Other places I've been in, yes. One place [is] near that BIG commercialized overlook that the Indians have covered
with their little stores. When we made the hike there, I tried to put water caches, and one of them was at this
particular place. Just on the upstream edge of that big commercial area there's a ravine that goes down, and there's
access to it from across the way a little bit.
Quinn: Now, to my knowledge, there's two parking areas like that. There's one that's a little higher up, and the
other one is maybe four miles or three miles further down the hill.
Steck: I think it's THAT one.
Quinn: Okay, the biggest one.
Steck: The biggest one, yeah. When we went down it, it was a regular treasure trove of debris. You know they have
the idea when they finish their can of pop, over goes the can, down into this drainage. I estimate roughly that
there might have been twenty thousand cans, aluminum cans. At fifty cents a pound--which is what the Indians get
at Tuba City, and I think there's sixteen to the pound, that's roughly three cents apiece -that's, what, $600 or
something like that. Anyway, there was a lot of them, plus a couple of cars, plus a refrigerator, plus a variety
of camera stuff. Of course I don't think anything survives the fall down there. But there's that entry point. Who
is it that wrote that guide book that lists all his times? He has to always be RUNNING someplace it seems like.
Oh, The Something Something Guide to the Colorado Plateau. Michael. . . . No. But anyway, he tried going down the
Little Colorado twice from Cameron, and lost his camera both times getting stuck in the mud. So he finally went
down this way and started to go down. I think he gave up then too because he makes a statement to the effect that
he had been told that the way is impossible, that there's a barrier fall farther down that would keep you from
getting to the Big Colorado. I've forgotten his name. |
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