Canyonlands: A New National Park?

Paul Brooks

IT WAS a full moon, and the guests were standing looking out over the area south. And one man spoke up and said: ‘This is one of the grand viewpoints of the world.’ ” This burst of plenilunar enthusiasm appears in, of all places, the transcript of “Hearings before the Subcommittee on Public Lands of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Senate” on a bill to create Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, at the center of one of our greatest wilderness areas south of Alaska.

A national park does not simply burst into existence, fully armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus; Hephaestus and his hammer have a job to do first. A new park can be created, of course, only by Act of Congress. Before such a bill can be introduced, many studies must be undertaken, many questions answered; public hearings must be held, hundreds of persons with diverse and often conflicting interests allowed to have their say. Obviously the initial question is: “Does the area meet national park standards?” In a sense those standards were set by the great parks — among them Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier — that were already in existence when the Park Service was established in 1916. Later they were defined as: “scenery of supreme and distinct quality, or some natural feature so extraordinary or unique as to be of national interest and importance.”

There is no question on the part of the Park Service or the Advisory Board (a nongovernmental body) that the area surrounding the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, now called Canyonlands, meets these standards. There is, however, a sharp difference of opinion about what sort of park we should have. In fact, the amount of heat generated in this debate seems at first out of all proportion to the issues at stake. Men with commercial interests are lined up against conservationists, game hunters against park purists, the senior senator from Utah against the junior senator, the governor of the state against the Secretary of the Interior. The political battle over Canyonlands is of national interest because it brings into focus basic conflicts about the proper use of our remaining open spaces. Let us take a quick backward glance at the geography and history of this scenic battleground, which my wife and I visited last summer.

Canyonlands lies at the heart of what geographers call the Plateau Province, a dry, elevated plain that in Mesozoic times was a great loop of the sea and now includes most of Utah, parts of Wyoming to the north and Colorado to the east, and to the south the Grand Canyon of Arizona. It is a country of clear air and sharp edges, of utter stillness and sudden violence. In his biography of John Wesley Powell, who first mapped the area less than a century ago, Wallace Stegner describes it as “scenically the most spectacular and humanly the least usable of all our regions.” Indeed, it is so rugged and so difficult of access that parts of it remain unexplored to this day.

Climatically as well as scenically, Canyonlands is a country of extremes. The temperature range is 130 degrees. Rainfall is sparse; what little there is comes largely from thunderstorms and runs off in flash floods. There are virtually no roads; travel is by horseback, foot, or jeep. Indians lived here in the distant past, but the first organized exploration was made by the Powell Expedition of 1869, an incredibly daring venture led by that one-armed veteran of the Civil War who was later to found the Geological Survey and shape the entire development of the West. The very year that the railroads were joined with the driving of the golden spike, Powell had three specially built boats transported by flatcar to the town of Green River, Wyoming, where the track crossed the Green River. Leaving the newly built railroad, Powell and his companions literally plunged into the unknown, through roaring rapids in which they often capsized and sometimes almost perished, to emerge eventually, sunbaked, sandblasted, and half starved, in the calm waters below the Grand Canyon.

In the course of this and the subsequent expedition of 1871, they recorded impressions of the Canyonlands country with the eloquence of near disbelief: “Nothing was in sight but barren sandstone, red, yellow, brown, grey, carved into an amazing multitude of towers, buttes, spires, pinnacles, some of them several hundred feet high, and all shimmering under a dazzling sun. It was a marvellous mighty desert of bare rock, chiselled by the ages out of the foundations of the globe; fantastic, extraordinary, antediluvian, labyrinthian, and slashed in all directions by crevices; crevices wide, crevices narrow, crevices medium, some shallow, some dropping till a falling stone clanked resounding into the far hollow depths.” Or, to borrow a phrase from Ebenezer Bryce, describing what is now Bryce Canyon National Park, “A hell of a place to lose a cow.”

THE visitor to Canyonlands today can see what Powell’s men saw, virtually unchanged. And one attraction of this area is that it can be approached on several levels — from the rim, from the lower benches, from the canyon bottoms, and from the river. My wife and I planned to explore the canyons by jeep, but we decided to take a hawk’seye view before we took the view of the desert mice and the ground squirrels.

We began with the “grand viewpoint” referred to above, one of the few spots in the proposed park now accessible by road. The two-hour drive was a primary lesson in geology and desert ecology. Nowadays, in the light of incontrovertible geological evidence, one accepts the amazing fact that this weird landscape is the product of erosion; that the principal canyons have been created over aeons of time by the slow rising of the earth’s crust, while the river, maintaining a constant elevation, slowly cut through the rock, as a fixed buzz saw will cut through the log that is pressed up against it, and while smaller streams, rain, and frost ground away at the exposed surface. It is hard to realize that this process is going on now, just as it always has. “When thinking of these rocks,” wrote Powell in his journal, “one must not conceive of piles of boulders or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it . . . all highly colored . . . never lichened, never moss-covered, but bare, and often polished.” Here is a supremely articulate landscape whose very clarity challenges us to interpret its secrets. The color of the rock is, of course, one key to its origin, though it varies with different exposures. From where we stood we could see the difference between the white rim of hard rock and the softer red rock beneath. The former was deposited by the wind, as one can still see from the delicate tracery of matted curves and whorls of what is aptly described as a “frozen sand dune.” The red rock was formed by water deposition when all this country lay under the sea. This difference in hardness results in undercutting of the canyon walls; where erosion has proceeded further, it has created gigantic mushroomlike columns.

On this high, windswept plateau we found the vegetation to be sparse, for the competition is not for space and sunlight but for water. The principal trees, piñon pines and desert junipers, tend to be widely scattered; the latter, often no larger than shrubs despite their great age, are gnarled and contorted beyond belief. Sparse sagebrush on the flats gives the landscape here and there a faint wash of blue-green, and yucca with its spikes of creamy-white flowers reminds one that this is indeed semidesert. But the most striking evidence of desert conditions is the leaf structure of what we think of as broad-leafed trees. The single-leaf ash, the curly-leaf mountain mahogany — their leaves, designed to allow the minimum evaporation, are almost as narrow and tough as the needles of an evergreen. Here was living proof—though barely living, it seemed — that evolving forms will develop some way to use every niche in the environment.

On the way out we had met a cowpoke, new style, driving a pickup truck with his horse in back. (The modern cow pony enjoys this form of locomotion and is as eager to go for a ride as the family dog.) Ignorant of the country, he was scouting ahead to find water for a thirsty herd of cattle. We could tell him there wasn’t any, nor much grass either. Later, as I studied the Senate hearings on the park bill, with all the talk of grazing rights, I thought of this incident. Much of the area can support no grazing at all. It is a soulsatisfying country, but cows cannot live on scenery.

Two days later, having enjoyed our bird’s-eye view, we re-entered the park area from another direction to explore the canyons at close quarters. “During the next hour or so,” remarked our host at the wheel of his jeep, “we’ll be going down about a hundred million years.” The superintendent of nearby Arches National Monument, he was one of the best jeep herders in Utah —which is to say, one of the best this side of the moon, the imaginative pictures of whose surface might have been drawn from the country that now surrounded us. We were already below the dark-red entrada sandstone which, with the softer mudstone beneath it, has made the spectacular forms occurring in Arches Monument; and we had passed through the Navajo formation below that. The rock walls were Wingate sandstone, with vertical seams and streaks of blue-black desert varnish, an exudation of manganese oxide which gives the polished effect referred to by Powell in his journal.

Here we had our first good look at the Indian petroglyphs, or rock carvings, whose exact origins are still shrouded in mystery. Beneath a slightly projecting ridge, which shielded it from the weather, was a rock wall the size of a barn door and equally flat. Virtually every square inch was covered with some design or picture: six-fingered hands and six-toed feet (why six?); lines of little men in silhouette, like a child’s cutout joined hand to hand; rams with curving horns; men with bows and arrows shooting deer; stretched hides; squiggly snakelike lines and circles and the tracks of a running rabbit. Many of the pictures stood out sharply, light buff against the dark background, as if they had been cut yesterday; others had been darkened by the slow deposition of desert varnish — a clue to their date if the rate of deposition can be determined.

Farther along we came to a cool moist cave beneath a great ledge of overhanging rock, like the opening of a giant clamshell. At the inmost recess, where the sloping roof came down to the dirt floor, lay a spring-fed pool, with maidenhair fern growing in the crevices above it, as it might have grown in a mist-filled mountain gorge. The contrast between the cave’s microclimate and the arid heat outside underscored the obvious fact, which we sometimes forget in the East, that water is life. As historians like Bernard De Voto and Walter Prescott Webb have pointed out, the Easterner’s concept of land values and the schoolbook stereotype of “frontier independence” both collapse before the fact that land ownership in the absence of water is meaningless. The Indians who once dwelt in these canyons were slowly driven elsewhere, not by warlike invaders from outside, but by unbearable years of drought. The cave where we now stood, with its precious spring, was clearly a focal point for Indian life, as it will be for tomorrow’s tourists if the park is established.

On the same wall with the maidenhair fern were pictographs, not cut in the rock but painted in red pigment, recalling the Indian paintings of caribou and moose and other North Woods creatures that we had studied from our canoe in the Borderlakes country seven hundred miles to the north. These fragile rock paintings of unknown antiquity also reminded us how vulnerable is this still virgin land to casual destruction by the machine age, how it cries aloud for protection while yet there is time. One of the witnesses before the Senate committee had been camping nearby: “The cave we camped in had Indian writings on the wall, and among them were thirteen handprints in red clay . . . we found a rock with three metates in the top — you know, where they ground their corn. And I could just picture the Indian women sitting around gossiping and grinding their corn. . . . When we returned to the area a year or so later, someone had had a caterpillar tractor in there and turned over the rock that had the metates and they were no longer visible. The cave we were in had had a fire right under the handprints on the wall, and they were well smoked out. I think that things like this shouldn’t be allowed to happen. . . .”

Fortunately, many of the Indian ruins — dwellings, storehouses for corn, ceremonial buildings — are on inaccessible ledges where they have remained largely undisturbed. As we continued down one of the canyons, we spotted several of the low redstone structures, with their neat rectangular openings, perched like swallows’ nests high above us in the canyon wall. One was easy to reach, and I climbed up to explore it. The roof had long since fallen in, but the walls still stood. In the mud daubing between the stone blocks was a thumbprint that could have been made last week, the whorls sharp and clear enough to satisfy any detective who might be on that Indian’s trail. But the trail would have led back to the age of the Crusades.

The jeep tract we were following now began to descend in earnest. Below the sheer cliffs were slopes of gray-purple and greenish shales. In geologic terms, we were descending from the Lower Jurassic to the Upper Triassic period, back to the time before birds or mammals had appeared on earth. The reptiles, of course, had already been flourishing for millions of years. Elsewhere in Canyonlands, on the slopes above the Colorado River near a wall covered with petroglyphs, I had seen fine specimens of dinosaur tracks. What did the Indians make of them?

The walls above us were becoming more strangely sculptured and involute at every turn, ranging in color from red-brown and maroon to a creamy white. We were in the so-called Cutler formation, and on our vertical time scale were down to the Permian period, over two hundred million years away. It would be hard to find another place that conveys such a dramatic sense of time — human time and geologic time, two concepts so different from each other in scale that a single word is inadequate to cover both. The Indian petroglyph and the footprint of the dinosaur. A thousand years, forty or fifty generations, is at least conceivable in human terms. But a hundred million years makes no mental image at all; one has to accept it almost as an act of faith. Perhaps our minds cannot encompass such distances in time because our residence on earth has been so relatively short. Homo sapiens has evolved too recently even to make a respectable fossil. On that now familiar time scale projecting the history of the earth over a single year, he first appears during the last minutes before midnight on December 31. If we bear in mind the nearby uranium mines, any New Year’s celebration seems premature.

This time scale is useful in considering the immediate question of a national park. It is an ominous fact that in the long chain of evolution the latest link, man, has suddenly acquired alchemic. powers to alter whatever he touches. No other species before man has been able to change more than a tiny fraction of his habitat. Now there is but a tiny fraction that he has left unchanged. A bulldozer undoes in an hour the work of a million years. The natural world becomes a thing to be manipulated. “You don’t push nature around very easily,” one of our leading young scientists is quoted as saying. Then he added, eagerly, “But maybe we are getting to that point.” The point of no return. If all outdoors is to be subdued to our immediate practical purposes, then the entire national park concept is nonsense, and to add a new park to the system is to compound our foolishness. For a national park might be defined as an area in which, by federal statute, nature may not be pushed around.

Desert camping has its own peculiar appeal to the amateur of nature. For one thing, the very sparseness of the natural scene gives him some hope of getting reasonably acquainted with it on a short visit. Some years ago my wife and I were dry-camping in a true desert, of a very different sort from Canyonlands — the Organ Pipe Cactus Monument in Arizona, close to the border of Mexico. Used to pitching our tent in wooded country where so much life goes on unseen, we could not help feeling that here in the desert everything was, so to speak, spread out and on display. It would have taken a blind man not to see the incredibly bright yellow and black Scott’s oriole picked out by the setting sun on a distant hillside or the zebralike Gila woodpecker pecking at the trunk of a nearby saguaro. The cacti which made up the principal vegetation were spaced far apart, as if in a garden, and almost wore their own labels: the organ-pipe (which the Monument was set up to preserve), the barrel cactus, the prickly pear, the staghorn and fuzzy-bear cholla (beware its needlelike fuzz!), and, dominating all, the giant saguaro, a thick pole with stubby arms raised against the sky. The fresh green steins of the paloverde and the orange spikes of the desert candle shouted their identity; and when I was slow in recognizing ironwood, it introduced itself by taking a huge nick out of my ax.

So here in Canyonlands, which is semidesert, we quickly became familiar with the principal plants composing the threads of green along the dry beds of the so-called creeks, whose scoured rocks and rippled sand provide the only access to much of the interior. Looking down from above, we had seen bands of blue-green bordering the Colorado River and creeping up the Canyons; now we were among those feathery branches of the tamarisk, or salt cedar, with its delicate pink and yellow blossoms, an immigrant from the Mediterranean that has brought much beauty to its adopted home. There were snowberries and squawberries, corn grass and thistles, the bright blossom of the scarlet gilea and the white, petunialike flower of the thorn apple. A hummingbird was darting from one flower to another. The only large tree was that trademark of the West, the cottonwood, and it was rare enough; we lunched in the shade of one of the widely scattered groves by a live creek, a sort of oasis with grass underfoot and tracks of mule deer in the spongy earth nearby. A small puddle was full of tadpoles and tiny frogs, whose life cycle must be a continuous crash program to take advantage of the water while it lasts.

When I said that everything in a desert seems on display, I was of course omitting the mammal and reptile population. Here even the small animals are nocturnal; it is not so much a matter of concealment as of avoiding the fierce dehydrating rays of the sun. We did flush a few rabbits and ground squirrels during the day; tiny lizards darted over the rocks, and a larger collared lizard scuttled in front of the jeep before diving into its hole. Evidence of night life was written in the sand; not only tracks of a deer, but small round footprints rather like those of a fox, though not so straight in line — the bobcat, as much at home in these canyons as he is in our New England woods.

In Canyonlands, however, it is not the plants and animals but the fantastic rock formations that bring one up gasping at every new outlook. To be sure, it is sometimes difficult to say whether the gasps come from the beauty of the scenery or the unnatural sensation of climbing up a cliff in a series of switchbacks so sharp that the jeep occasionally has to back up the next switch instead of making the turn, providing an incomparable view over the rear wheel down into nothing. Seat belts fastened, we braced our feet and held our breaths as our mechanical steed pitched and rolled up a hard polished slope to which one would hesitate to put a real horse. On the downslope, another quick change of scene: a flat sunken valley lined with vertical walls, called a graben and caused by slowly dissolving salts which leave a cavity beneath the rock floor. Then a long stretch of golden grassland, its healthy state paradoxically due to the fact that there is no water in the area and hence none of the overgrazing by livestock that has reduced other areas of Canyonlands to thin grass and tumbleweed. And finally, at the edge of this parklike area, we came to the great spires of red and caramel rock that we had studied from afar, rising from the flats as abruptly and improbably as Stonehenge from Salisbury Plain.

Back at the canyon bottom, a few hundred yards from a magnificent natural arch, we spread our bedrolls beneath a great rock ledge which sloped outward just far enough to keep off a light drizzle and which conveniently concentrated a puddle of rainwater nearby. Perhaps this natural cistern is one reason why the Indians had liked the spot. For we lay down to sleep between squared stones that still outlined the foundations of four ancient structures. Overhead, black swifts swept back and forth against the fading sky, and now the bats began to emerge zigzagging from their caves in the rock. Our thoughts returned to the crucial issue of the park.

THE controversy over Canyonlands is important because, as I said, it represents a conflict of principle. The persons who take such a strong stand on one side or the other are thinking of the future, of the whole thorny question of land requirements for an exploding population. Everyone agrees that a national park is a good thing. But when it comes down to specifics, opinions differ. How big should it be to accomplish its purpose? Just what, in fact, is its purpose? How will it affect the local and the national economy? What, if any, secondary uses, such as mining, grazing, and hunting, should be permitted? These questions go to the root of national park policy.

In the case of Canyonlands, Secretary Udall originally proposed the taking of approximately one million acres, which would have included the entire erosion basin as a geologic unit. The bill introduced by Senator Moss of Utah, and the identical bill introduced in the House by Congressmen King and Peterson, drastically reduced this area to 330,000 acres. (Grand Canyon National Park is 673,000 acres.) This area is considered by many who know the country well to be inadequate. The governor of Utah, on the other hand, opposes the bill on the grounds that it is too much; he would prefer a sort of fragmented park consisting of relatively small areas surrounding the principal scenic marvels.

Hearings on the Moss bill were held last spring, first in Washington, later in Utah. Almost seven hundred pages of testimony have been printed. They are not bedside reading, but they do provide a vivid if somewhat chaotic picture of the democratic process at work. Everyone has his day in court: senators and congressmen, Park Service officials, spokesmen for the leading conservation organizations, foresters, state and local politicians, professors, engineers, bankers, miners, cattlemen, motel owners, licensed guides. From this plethora of words a pattern begins to emerge. Practically everyone is for the park in principle; to the surrounding communities it would bring millions of tourist dollars every year. But a park, if it means anything at all, means rigid control of land use, and that is where the trouble begins.

By allowing controlled mining and grazing and hunting under certain conditions within the boundaries of the park, by recognizing the principle of so-called multiple use, the Moss bill represents a compromise with basic national park principles. Conservationists and others concerned with the integrity of the park system consider this a dangerous precedent; they would strike out this provision in the bill. At the opposite pole, local mining interests claim that the provision is not strong enough; they point out that the Secretary of the Interior “may prescribe such general regulations for the control of these activities as he deems necessary to preserve the scenic, scientific, and recreation values of the area.” They want no regulation — which means no park, except in name. As Secretary Udall has pointed out, this is like trying to have your cake and eat it too. More specifically, it is like allowing the wedding cake to be pulled apart in search of the ring and the thimble — which probably are not there anyway.

What resources would in fact be “locked up” if all commercial exploitation were prohibited? The whole place has been prospected for uranium with negative results. In any case, to quote Senator Anderson’s haunting metaphor, “We have got more uranium rolling out of our ears than we know what to do with.” A study made by the University of Utah shows that there may be other mineral deposits, but none are of known commercial value. Almost the entire area is under oil and gas lease: ten dry holes have been drilled; the eleventh, on the edge of the proposed park, recently brought in a producing well and is being excluded from the park area. Grazing rights in this arid country are insignificant; annual fees from the entire 330,000 acres amount to only $2700. The Moss bill allows grazing to continue for twenty-five years, though it must be obvious to anyone who has camped in Canyonlands that the cows and the tourists are going to use the same few spots that have water.

Deer hunting is a more emotional subject. The Moss bill provides for “the controlled reduction of wildlife in such park by hunters licensed by the State of Utah and deputized as rangers by the Secretary.” Of all the pressures that are put on the Park Service, the one for public hunting seems to arouse the loudest hallo. When the service uses its own personnel, as it has done in Yellowstone, scientifically to reduce the elk herds, there are cries of outrage from those who see wasted chances for sport. When specially licensed hunters are allowed to try their trigger fingers at it, as they were in Teton Park, the naturalists and conservationists cry havoc. The chief naturalist at Yellowstone supports their fears with statistics. Suppose that the reduction of the Yellowstone elk herd had been put in the hands of private hunters: “If their ability was equal to that of the 1,002 hunters in Grand Teton, nearly 18,000 hunters would have killed the 5,000 elk, plus 196 illegal moose, 410 illegal elk and seventeen men, along with an undetermined number of bears, coyotes, bighorn sheep, antelope, bison, mule deer and horses.” In Canyonlands the issue is one of principle rather than of powder and shot; only fortyone deer were taken from the whole region last year. The chances of bagging illegal animals are even more remote. But to legalize park hunting by statute may be a precedent more dangerous than bullets.

Mining, grazing, hunting: each has its staunch adherents, yet all are fundamentally incompatible with the basic park concept. The term “multiple use” has become a sort of shibboleth. In the case of our national parks, it is seriously misleading. In the first place, the proper use of our parks is itself multiple — wilderness preservation, recreation, protection of watersheds, sanctuaries for wildlife, undisturbed areas for scientific study. In the second place, commercial and recreational use are often mutually exclusive. For activities that disturb or deplete the land, the term “nonconforming use” is more accurate.

The battle will be fought to a finish on the floor of Congress. Political maneuver can be expected; for example, in the final days of the 1962 session the senior senator from Utah, who was up for reelection, introduced a new and weakened Canyonlands bill which might appeal to some of his constituents but not to anyone who wants a true national park. The traditional conflict between federal and states’ rights will be renewed; only recently the state fish and game commissioners officially went on record urging Congress, in clear contradiction to existing policy, to leave management in their hands “whenever any authority is granted to the National Park Service to create any new areas or to increase the size of existing areas.” The Utah commissioner, at the Canyonlands hearings, attacked “the autocratic and highhanded attitudes of the National Park Service” which threatened “the sovereignty of the State.”

None of this, of course, is new, but it does make the Canyonlands issue worth studying. For, as the developing embryo of an individual organism suggests earlier stages in the evolution of the species, so the study of a single park in embryo reminds us of the evolutionary history of the park system itself. The issues raised in the discussion of Canyonlands echo those raised when Yellowstone Park was born ninety years ago, when the Grand Canyon was saved by Teddy Roosevelt (its rim was once staked with mining claims), when the unique rain forest in Washington’s Olympic Park was preserved from the ax, when Jackson Hole in the Tetons was added to the park system against local opposition to become one of Wyoming’s greatest assets. The story of the national park concept is the story of the evolution of an idea, now momentarily spotlighted in those glowing redrock canyons at the heart of the Plateau Province.