A Glen Canyon Odyssey

 
 

Jump-ups


In most of the side canyons your exploration is stopped by a jump-up, a wall with a waterfall and a narrow intriguing slot of a canyon above.  Sometimes that slot empties into the ceiling of a room like a showerhead in a rock-walled shower room.  More often than not the water’s fall is into a deep pool, and maidenhair fern and monkey flower grow from seeps around the pool. 

Further exploration always tempts.  You can devise ways to climb the fall, and sometimes you are rewarded with more entrancing canyon.  A three-man stand sometimes works.  Sometimes you find “Moki steps.”  (A word about that term.  The Hopi word is “Moqui.” The early Spanish explorers reported back to home, Moqûi, but the accent got lost to a typsetter's carelessness.  In Spanish, Moqui is pronounced Moki–only exotic languages have the “qwi” sound. To the Hopi the distinction is important.  Moqûi refers to “The People”;  Moki means dead or dung.  Europeans often misunderstood conquered exotic cultures.)  And desert dams are "Moki Steps" to disaster.
 
 

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Grotto Canyon

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Perhaps the saddest footnote of all:  The flood of reservoir water destroyed virtually all except for that part of Glen Canyon we found of comparatively little interest, that which lay above elevation 3710.  And the flood of new people, mostly in powerboats, shifted the muscle power to gasoline power ratio to the inverse of what it had been.  It brought a new ethic, too.   After several months of power boat campers, we found that every single Anasazi site—the storage pits, the houses, the archeologist's excavations—had been used by campers as toilets.  It was not that so many more people had visited.  Especially in the last year of float trips, thousands had visited those sites, had treated those sites with respect, had felt that "obvious" need to protect what they were guests in.  In the new ethic, Moki had nudged out Moqûi

We have flooded the Sistine Chapel to get a better view of the ceiling.

The flood waters are gasoline polluted.