Quinn: Ken Phillips mentioned changes, that you went to certain archaeological or
certain historic sites in the Canyon that are no longer there, like some of Hance Cabin or the hippie camp that
was up Phantom Creek. Maybe you can touch on a few of those.
Steck: Well, the Hance Cabin, John Azar [is] in a search now for pictures of that cabin. My first trip down the
river I saw it, and I didn't think anything about it, it was just another cabin. You went in and there were shelves
of preserves, some Mason jars full of cherries. I'd think, "Oh, I got to have some of those!" But the
menu for the Sierra Club trip was pretty good, so I didn't open any of those. Now, when I was there in February,
I couldn't find the cabin site. It was 1957 to almost 1997, so almost forty years, it had disappeared, and I don't
even have a picture of it, although somebody that John seems to know about has a picture of it. The Sierra Club
would have a roster of the trip, so perhaps somebody could get hold of that roster and canvas the people on the
trip and see if anybody took a picture of it.
The hippie camp, well, my first trip to Phantom Ranch, maybe the first couple, were long enough ago that the pool
was still there, the swimming pool. That was a lot of fun, paddling around in there, and being cool in the heat.
It wasn't many years later that it was bulldozed full of rock and dirt, and gone for, well, I don't know which
of the reasons was really the operative one. But there were hippies in the area and they appropriated the pool
and the nudity offended some of the other users. So that's one reason that's given, there was too much naked bathing
there.
Another reason, I remember being told that hepatitis showed up in Bright Angel Creek. When the epidemiologists
were tracking it down, they checked up Bright Angel Creek and found there WASN'T any above the confluence with
Phantom Creek, so this was coming down Phantom Creek, and they found evidence of habitation up there. I don't think
they ever found anybody living there, but they found some drums that had been used to put trash in, fifty-five
gallon drums. How those ever got there, I don't know, but there were those. At the upper end near the Redwall route,
there are some stone outlines of walkways, and one small area that is sort of like an altar that could date to
this period. I call it the hippie camp, just because the outline of the trails around there indicate that there
was some occupancy, and I don't think a casual hiker would bother delineating the trails with ornaments like that.
As far as other cabins, I tend almost not to see these things. For example, those handprints along the wall at
Deer Creek. I probably have been to that place and walked along that trail a hundred times and never saw a handprint.
I'm looking at my feet, I guess, mainly, or looking down into the gorge. But then my son, when he was a ranger,
went along there with Bob Euler, and had all these handprints shown to him. He told me about them, and the next
time I went there, I saw them everywhere! It was just the fact that somebody had to tell me they were there before
they became visible. And then I found them way up in the open part more, beyond the Narrows.
Quinn: Deer Creek?
Steck: Yeah. And there's one little place that I think might have been a gravesite. There were some handprints
up there. So I can go by artifacts by the thousands and never see them. A big thing like a cabin that I can go
into, [I'd] probably notice that.
Quinn: Did you ever find cow pies out in places where you thought cows would never have been? Evidences of cowboy
camps in the Canyon?
Steck: Well, I have found cowboy camps twice. I guess one of them was near the top of the Redwall in 150 Mile Canyon,
or let's say in the middle of the Supai, in one of the side drainages. There was a big trunk kind of thing, a big
wooden box that you can open up, and there were blankets and magazines and things inside there. And there were
bedsprings and all kinds of signs of occupancy. As a matter of fact, it probably wouldn't take somebody TOO much
effort to make it suitable for occupancy again. Down at the junction where this side canyon comes into 150 Mile,
there were some more signs of occupancy in the form of sticks of dynamite. There was a wooden box of dynamite with
maybe eight sticks in it when I saw it for the first time. At that time, I was under the misconception that old
dynamite like that is relatively safe. So I carefully took a stick out and put it down by the box to take a picture
of it. Somebody told me later that they become more unstable with time.
Now those sticks have been removed and destroyed. In Kanab Creek, just below where the stream comes in opposite
Scottys Castle, I was camped in that area and it looked like it was going to rain, and I saw what appeared to be
a cave up [about] thirty feet above the drainage, behind all the catclaw. That was a struggle getting through there,
but I got up to it, and that was a sign of occupancy, this cave. It wasn't very big, and it sloped rather rapidly
back to a point, and it was so unlevel that it probably wouldn't suffice as a shelter, but there was a wall in
front of it, and timbers sloping from the top of the built-up wall back to the Redwall, and you could see that
maybe there could have been canvas on that, or a thatch of some kind, so that it was clear that somebody had occupied
that camp. |
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