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Show She had been perfectly preserved in almost all respects. The waterfall now flowed freely and the spring runoff cascaded over the sculptured lip of the drop-off and spattered in a pool fifty feet below. The ancient dark desert varnish around the waterfall had not faded in 40 years. The concoidal striations that were so clearly visible in Hyde’s images from 1964 were just as sharply defined. We looked THK CANYON COUNTRY ZEPHYR PO BOX 327 Jim at each MOAB, UTAH 84532 Stiles, other, almost in disbelief..we www.canyoncountryzephyr.com changed little; we found one large flat boulder near the top of the talus that must have served as the ultimate viewpoint. Ingebretsen kept saying softly, “This is where Hyde moabzephyr®yahoo.com stood...this is where Brower stood.” return. We all noted the seeps oozing from the canyon walls and » asubtle hint of green around those wet places in the Navajo sandstone. Nature was already at work ...restoration! Along _ the wash bottom, signs of new growth were everywhere. We could see how the runoff continued to scour the canyon of eos Coan the artist John Depuy webmaster Gary Henderson Subscriptions & transcriptions Linda Vaughan circulation Marianne Apadaca JABryan Tracy Murphy Mark Anderson Kathy Aldous THE ZEPHYR, copyright 2005 The Zephyr is published six times a year at Moab, Utah. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of its vendors, advertisers, or even at times, of its publisher. All photos and cartoons are by the publisher unless otherwise noted am atc\(l me eloy weird enough (olan Hunter 8. Thompason 1937-2005 And it was still there, just waiting for Nature to expose the rock and for us to contributing writers Ken Sleight Martin Murie Scott Silver Barry Scholl Chinle Miller Ned Mudd Dan Rosen Cactus Rat Michael Wolcott Philip Hyde Wendell Berry Bianca Dumas Robert Funkhouser Erica Walz Bill Boyle & the Heath Monitor Files Zephyr pilot & aerial reconaissance Paul Swanstrom ourselves lost within a year). Incredibly, even the broken rocks had cezephyr®frontiernet.nel historic photographs Herb Ringer (1913-1998) found speaking in whispered tones. It had been a long time since I’d seen and _ heard silence like that. We traveled back to the talus slope where Hyde had taken his 1964 photo (at the time the reservoir was already rising and Hyde knew the scenes he was shooting would be publisher py sediments and push it farther downstream, toward the Gulf ok of California where it ultimately must someday be allowed to ee Jity go. ads from time to time, we came upon an old beer can or ' Piece of rope or lost thermos cup—the detritus of the last 40 years of motorized recreation in this holy chamber. But what surprised us was how little garbage there was to be found. Si il es The Cathedral in the Desert, without any help from us, OUT OF THE BLUE: The Return of Cathedral in the Desert It looked almost exactly like Phil Hyde’s photograph. I first saw Hyde’s classic 1964 image of Glen Canyon’s “Cathedral in the Desert” more than 25 years ago. Even then, a full decade had come and gone since the rising waters of Lake Powell inundated this extraordinary work of Nature in was, in the most tranquil way imaginable, one tiny step ata time, restoring itself. Trying to put back what we had taken away. Allit needs from us is Time...that most precious of all commodities. But there’s the Rub saativameme 150 feet of stagnant fluid. For most of us, it was as if the Cathedral simply didn’t exist anymore. Only Abbey was wise enough to remind all of us that the Cathedral and the rest of Glen Canyon weren't gone at all; they were, he insisted, simply in “liquid storage.” He was more right than he even knew. Two years ago, when the drought had already pulled the reservoir level down by 90 feet, 1 traveled with Rich Ingebretsen, the president of the Glen Canyon Institute (GCI), to Lake Powell. We went by boat from Hall’s Crossing to the “Escalante Arm” of Lake Powell, then turned left up a narrow side canyon to the place we thought the Cathedral should be. We guessed right. It was still difficult to gauge our location from old photos because we were floating sixty feet above the old canyon floor. But as we made a tight turn to the left, we spotted the top of the waterfall that once marked the upstream terminus of the Cathedral, just four or five feet beneath us, still submerged. We were that tantalizingly close. We wondered, as we reluctantly departed later that day, if this was as close as we’d ever come. Climatologists even then were predicting a fundamental shift in weather patterns in North America and many scientists predicted that Lake Powell would continue to fall. They were right. By this spring, Lake Powell had dropped another 60 feet; according to GCI’s calculations, the Cathedral should be completely out of the water—Rich and I decided to take another look. Two weeks ago, we traveled again to the Cathedral via motorboat, the very form of transportation that would become obsolete if the reservoir ever runs dry, and both Rich and I noted the contradiction. The lake has made it almost impossible to explore much of Glen Canyon by any other means. So there we were, in a $20,000 rented motorboat, spewing a spray of lake water in our wake, trying to grow accustomed to the smell of 2-cycle motor oil and the roar of the outboard engine (I brought ear plugs), in order to see one of the most stunning sights on Earth, and one that no one had viewed in almost 40 years. Oh the irony. It took an hour to go from Hall’s Crossing to the mouth of the Escalante River and then up Clear Creek to a point where the canyon appeared to close in. It was just as Harlon Beamont and Burnett Hendrix, two writers for National Geographic had noted a half century before (see Rich’s article on the naming of the Cathedral on page 17). We were still in the boat, passing over the skeletal remains of cottonwoods that once filled this magnificent canyon with colors and aromas unmatched anywhere. But there was a slot at the back of the chamber, easier seen now than then, which allowed us to move a bit farther upstream. We made one _final turn to the right...there it was. PAGE2 All the hard work and good intentions of the Glen Canyon Institute, or the inspired words of Ed Abbey, or the regularly featured rants from this publication have had absolutely nothing to do with the Cathedral’s emergence from its watery grave. The fact that the Will of Nature has coincided with our pleas and laments is totally unexpected and a shock and a surprise to us all. I’m too cynical to think that Nature intended to be our partners in all this-she’d be just as agreeable to drowning us in a sudden desert flash flood as it would members of the Bureau of Reclamation. I don’t believe Nature takes sides, even when one side wants to kill her. But there is an opportunity. Now that Nature has shown her will, the least we can do is join her. Even a few Lake Lovers are beginning to concede, from what they’ve recently seen, that Glen Canyon is significantly more impressive above the water line than beneath it. And of course, there is a growing awareness of the slowly re-emerging Glen Canyon across the West and across America (ABC News ‘recently traveled with Ingebretsen to the Cathedral and spent almost a day there...look for it to appear on “ABC Nightline” in the near future.) But how do we help Glen Canyon save itself? The easy answer is to leave it alone. Convincing supporters of the reservoir won’t be easy at all...it might be impossible. But if it turns out that this year’s snowpack in the Rocky Mountains is an aberration, and the scientists are right (see Ingebretsen’s statistics on page 14), and if as a result, the reservoir continues to shrink, the Pro-Lake Powell arguments may become irrelevant. Then what? This has been a point of contention among many of wilderness’s staunchest defenders and Glen Canyon is no exception. The environmental movement is traveling in ‘directions I never dreamed possible, just a decade different. I would willingly give ago. Saving wild lands was never meant to be tied to economic development. Or even to human spiritual renewal...we tried to save wilderness for its own sake. Glen Canyon is no up the easy access to Cathedral in the Desert and resign myself to never seeing it again, if that kind of sacrifice meant that it might be saved. Any of us should be willing to make the same kind of |