Quinn: Since you mentioned that Unkar to Asbestos route, a number of guys have questioned
that. If you were to do it again, would you walk the shoreline like you did, or would you go up more to the Tonto
level?
Steck: I would do it just as I did.
Quinn: Were there difficult places?
Steck: Well, see, it's not a shoreline. There when the Canyon begins, essentially, after it's been wide and is
narrowing down to the Upper Narrows, the Shinumo quartzite ramp comes out, and you can go up that and contour around
on it until you get to the top of this drainage that I used to get back to the river. So there's no problem with
that at all, except as I said earlier, Robert thought that was a steep descent. He may have used a rope once to
lower some packs, but it seemed a perfectly natural-type route to me. Then you get down to the river at Hance and
you go along the river until you take a similar, now it's the Bass, I think, the Bass Conglomerate where the trail
gets on it . . . or maybe Dox, I don't know. It takes you to those mines that are drilled through the cliff up
there on the edge of Asbestos. Then you contour on Asbestos and get up on the Tonto and you're gone, away you go.
Quinn: People were asking if you've hiked between Fossil Bay and Havasu.
Steck: No, I haven't been on that side. That was what we were going to do in the spring of the year that Robert
escaped us.
Quinn: And what about downriver from Elves Chasm to Fossil there?
Steck: On the other side, still?
Quinn: Yeah.
Steck: Or on stream left?
Quinn: That was a boat trip when you had gone into Elves Chasm, and then you had hiked in, up and down Royal Arch.
Steck: Oh no, I have hiked over to Garnet and Elves Chasm from Boucher or wherever you would come from. But I haven't
ever been farther than Elves Chasm.
Quinn: Were there hikes that you did in the western end, like from Lava Falls west?
Steck: Yeah, that was on the long trip in 1982 when we hiked from Lees Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs.
Quinn: And you're working on a book now?
Steck: That's going to describe that hike.
Quinn: The whole book will be about that. And how many days did that take?
Steck: Eighty.
Quinn: Eighty days, starting at . . . ?
Steck: Starting at Lees Ferry.
Quinn: Oh, at Lees Ferry, okay. Can you maybe give us a preview of a few of the high points that'll be in that
book?
Steck: Of course the part from Lees Ferry to Lava Falls, I had done that before, but I hadn't ever done the route
along the river between 150 Mile and Tuckup that Robert showed us. One of the highlights of that trip was finding
a way down 150 Mile Canyon, because the goal was to put a cache in the Supai so that we would get on the Supai
and . . . . Wait a minute, I'm getting mixed up. We hiked Robert's route from Kanab down to 150 Mile, and then
the plan was to go up 150 Mile and then take the Esplanade over to Tuckup. In order to do that, we had to find
out whether you can get down or up 150 Mile in the first place. I'd gone there with Robert and you can get into
the Redwall Gorge below a chockstone. I went about twenty feet and there was another chockstone, and sheer walls
on the side so you can't bypass it. The only thing is, you gotta get down it somehow, and the best way to do that,
it seemed to me, was to rappel.
So I rigged up a rappel and got us down below THAT chockstone. Went about another fifty to one hundred feet and
there was another one! So you know the Redwall is four hundred feet thick, and how many of these chockstones is
there going to be?! The Redwall is a notoriously difficult formation to get through, so I didn't expect to be able
to, really, although I'd gone down Saddle Canyon, and that turned out to be quite easy. So we went back.
Then I came a year later, maybe two years later, with my brother, get some big guns here on this rappelling business.
Instead of putting a dead man in the drainage and rigging your rappel to that, I took bolts and a hammer and a
drill to put the bolts in. There were the first two, like I said, and then you just went smoothly from then on,
till we came to two more, and it turned out there were just those four, just those four chockstones. I don't know,
as high as this, was about all, maybe even like that side or like this side. Some were shorter than others, fifteen
to twenty feet was about all there was. We put in those four bolts and there was one bypass that we needed. That
was quite an extensive contouring along, and then going in a side drainage and then down.
Quinn: In 150 Mile?
Steck: Yeah, that was nearer the bottom. But there were just those four. I put the bolt in, put a hanger, and put
a carabiner in the hanger, and then I rigged a line, like a sixteenth-inch nylon line, through the carabiner and
made a loop out of it and put it on the wall in some convenient place, taped it with duct tape -the idea being
that when we got to these things, we'd undo the line and carefully tie it to our rope and pull the rope up to the
carabiner and then down and then prussik up the rope. Well, it didn't work out that way, because
there'd been a flash flood through 150 Mile that just took out all of our little nylon lines, just abraded them.
At the lip of the overhangs of those chockstones, I'd reached out and up to put in my bolt so it would take a considerable
flow to disturb those, but they were all gone. My brother, though, was able to upclimb all these chockstones with
the help of a Friend, about an inch-and-a-quarter type Friend. You know what those things are?
Quinn: The expanders?
Steck: Yeah. You put them in a crack and when you pull back on them they cam out and force themselves to hold.
That, and a little hook thing, a sky hook, was useful. And with us supporting his feet and his wiggling around,
he got up all these things.
Going up 150 Mile on the trip was probably the highlight of the trip because he was able to upclimb these things
which it wasn't clear at all that the rest of us could have done it, Robert or Stan or myself, Stan being my younger
son. All this time it was drizzling, which brought up to mind right away the concept of a flash drizzle. You know,
does a drizzle accumulate enough water during a day to flash in some sense? Well, we worried about it. Toward the
end of the day . . . oh, we finally had to take off our clothes because it was so wet and everything was sticking,
all your clothes were just sticking to you, and it was hard to move and move your arms around. Anyway, we finally
get up the last chockstone . . |
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