Steck: Something you said in your letter made me think about in what ways hiking
there now is different from hiking there thirty years ago. There's really very little that's different. As you
mentioned, there's a couple of debris flows down some of the side canyons, but they don't seem to make all that
much of an impact on the side canyon, not as much as they make on the rapid below it. But for a hiker, a rapid
isn't all that significant. Well, in a way, it IS significant, because that's when the beer things come loose from
the boats that you then find floating in an eddy some way farther down.
But there's one debris flow that did alter things for the worse, and that's in this tributary canyon to Kanab by
Scottys Castle, a little stream there. When I first was there, it was a lovely little stream. In through the Redwall
there were little bathtubs, like they were strung together on a necklace, maybe eight or ten of them, with a little
bit of stream in between them. They were big enough to get in, just barely. There were some bigger pools. When
we used that route to get from Kanab Creek up to the Esplanade in 1977, there were some pools that were JUST almost
over your head and you'd have to hold your pack over your head and walk along and then kind of throw it on the
upstream side and somebody would grab it then before it slipped back in the water. There were several, maybe two
of those. In the tributary canyon to THAT tributary canyon, going up through the Redwall, there were places where
you had to chimney; other places where you'd travel the length of a pool in a layout; and a variety of little waterfalls,
little ferns and delightful spots. But now it's gone, just gone, unrecognizable. The first tributary canyon is
just wall-to-wall gravel with no stream anymore, no bathtubs to play in, no almost-over-your-head pools to worry
about, just gone. The route up the second tributary canyon, up to the top of the Redwall, that's gone too. There's
just nothing of beauty there anymore. There's maybe a half-a-dozen chockstones of modest difficulty, but nothing
pretty there anymore. So that is a change that I regret. Let me look at my notes here and see if there's any other
things that I regretted at the time.
Deer Creek is a favorite place of mine, and I like camping on the top of the Tapeats, on those ledges there. One
time I came, and there'd been a rockfall from I guess stream left. It always looks like it's getting ready to fall,
but this time it HAD fallen and filled the whole thing up, and it was just depressing to look at it. I had a favorite
little place that I called the Jacuzzi pool about that wide, maybe that long, and deep enough so that it's like
this when you're standing in it. There's all kinds of turbulence there, and you can get in it and you put your
feet against the downstream lip of this pool and the water swirls around and it's like a Jacuzzi. Well, that was
gone, just all full of stuff. I had the wrong idea about the impact that I could have, overestimated my usefulness,
because I began throwing rocks off the lip there of that first Deer Creek Fall trying to tidy-up the place. I tidied-up
a storm without seeming to make any difference whatsoever. I never did get down to the Jacuzzi. Well, enjoyed it
as best we could, and then came back another year and it was all like it had been in the first place. Another flash
flood had come through and just swept it all clean and it was just as nice as it always was. Then about five years
later it got all crudded up again. And then another year or so and it's all clean again. So flash floods can do
a lot of tidying.
The same thing can't be said though of fires. Deer Creek has had two fires, one was in the spring of 1977, and
the first long hike where I was going by there was in the fall of 1977. I was wondering how bad it was going to
look because it's one of my favorite places and I hate to see it all burned to a crisp. But you know, it was hardly
noticeable. By then, the cottonwoods had come back. There were a couple of charcoaled stumps, but in general, you
were hard-put to see any great difference. The barrel cacti were still there and the opunchas were still there.
It looked pretty much the way I had HOPED it would look, nowhere near like I EXPECTED it to look.
They had another fire there, a worse fire, in the spring of this year, spring of 1995. Again, a toilet paper fire.
But somebody who was there recently--I guess it was Ken Phillips, maybe he flew over it, maybe that was it -said
that it looks like it's coming back pretty well. So I think the life force is alive and well in Deer Creek.
I hate to say this, I started a small toilet paper fire of my own. I probably burned a hundred square feet, a ten-by-ten
patch of grass. This was in a rain. You'd think if there's anytime when you'd be safe from starting such a fire,
it would be in a rain. Well, it drizzled, kind of, but it burned just the same, just made a little more smoke in
the process. So I'm a believer in carrying out my toilet paper. |
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