Footsteps of Fiftymile

Christina D. Vojta

 

Until we heard the rhythmic splash of someone wading, the only sound in the narrow canyon was the soft plunk of our paddles. Scott and I hadn’t seen another human being in two days. Our watery passage, Fiftymile Creek, twisted between peach-colored sandstone cliffs that rose over a hundred feet above us, dead vertical. We were navigating the Southwest version of a narrow canal in Venice, but without the people. Camping gear bulged from the midsection of our canoe, serving as our life support for two weeks while we explored the side branches of Utah’s Lake Powell. Fiftymile was a creek in name only, due to the impoundment of water behind Glen Canyon Dam in 1963 and the subsequent drowning of the Colorado River immediately upstream from Grand Canyon National Park.

The sound was strange and unexpected—someone was splashing through water as though hiking down a shallow creek. Galumph, galumph, galumph. Such wading, however, was impossible due to the depth of the water, which was over our heads. Our canoe glided on a lake channel, not a stream, yet the wader was definitely in shallow water, an observation that both confused us and gave us the creeps.

I spun around to assess Scott’s reaction and offered my opinion in a scant whisper. “A deer? Bighorn?” His shrug conveyed his answer—maybe. Without a word, we both leaned into our paddles in hopes of a glimpse of the animal. But as we carved our canoe around an ancient wall of rock, we saw nothing. The man or beast had eluded us while the sound continued to tease our ears. Galumph, galumph, galumph.

By then, our senses were as sharply-honed as the edges of the cliffs that squeezed us on either side. The splashing was distinctly human in its regularity and gait, but eerily non-human in its speed and agility. Who could possibly wade at a pace faster than our canoe could glide? We ceased paddling and looked at each other. The only possible explanation was the most irrational one—we were hearing a ghost, wading through a creek that no longer existed.

“I think it’s the ghost of an ancient hunter,” I whispered. I meant one of the ancestral Puebloans who inhabited Glen Canyon seven hundred years ago. They grew corn and other crops, built homes on the sides of cliffs, and wrote their stories on sandstone walls in the form of pictographs and petroglyphs. These people mysteriously left the Southwest, possibly due to drought, warfare, famine, or a harrowing combination of all three. Evidence of human sacrifice and even cannibalism lend credence to harsh times. If ever a time or place could foster the creation of ghosts, the last days of the ancestral Puebloans certainly qualified. The present-day waters of Lake Powell conceal remnants of cliff dwellings, panels of rock art, and bones of people long dead.

We listened to the firm, muscular stride of the hunter and imagined him heading downstream in his yucca-woven sandals, using the creek as a trail. Whatever happened that day—the spear of an enemy, the claw of a cougar—had left him forever walking, long after the rest of his family had gathered their possessions and fled south.

We resumed our paddling while the spirit splashed ahead of us. But now, the acoustics of the canyon changed, and the wading seemed heavier—the quality of boots, not yucca sandals. Galumph, galumph, galumph. I heard a gasp from the back of the canoe, and I twisted my torso to discover the cause. Scott’s face was lit with revelation. “It’s Everett Ruess,” he whispered. I considered his speculation, then nodded.

Everett Ruess had gone missing in 1934 in Davis Gulch—just one canyon to the north of Fiftymile. We had explored Davis the previous day and had seen remnants of the brush corral where Ruess’ camping gear and two mules had been found the spring after his disappearance. Ruess was a loner who preferred to share his time with coyotes and ravens in the remote canyons of the Southwest rather than abide with humans in a crowded city. In that regard, he was not too different from Scott and me, and we relished the idea of encountering his ghost. We knew of his journeys from his sketches and paintings, numerous letters, and a couple of journals. His wanderings were often trailless and treacherous, through slickrock country with little margin for error. We had scrambled through that wild terrain ourselves and had witnessed its unforgiving temperament. Ruess wrote of many hardships and close calls, yet concluded, “Whatever I have suffered in the months past has been nothing compared with the beauty in which I have steeped my soul.” In his last letter to his brother, he wrote, “As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.”

The cliffs above us formed a high route between Fiftymile and Davis Gulch where Ruess left his mules. We could easily imagine a day hike gone wrong, the twist of an ankle, the crumbling of a foothold, that would have left Ruess’s bones directly below our canoe. His spirit, however, would have sprung free and continued to wander in search of beauty.

The footsteps continued to move away from us, and I paddled harder, hoping for the first sighting of Everett Ruess in seventy-five years. But then, the canyon walls subtly altered the quality of the footsteps again, bringing to mind the texture of Vibram soles worn by hikers since the 1950s. My imagination went into high gear. “It’s the ghost of David Brower,” I whispered. Brower, a steadfast environmentalist, devoted his life to the creation and protection of national parks and wilderness areas in the second half of the twentieth century. In spite of his vast achievements in conservation, Brower had one significant failure that haunted him for the rest of his life—the loss of Glen Canyon to the waters of Lake Powell.

Brower was the Executive Director of the Sierra Club in the 1950s when the Bureau of Reclamation, funded by Congress, hatched a plan for dams on the Colorado River. One of these was the proposed Echo Park Dam, a monstrous structure that would have flooded the major tributaries of the Colorado flowing through Dinosaur National Monument. In his efforts to prevent this travesty, Brower struck a devil’s deal: the Sierra Club agreed not to oppose other dams described in the comprehensive water management plan if the section of the Colorado River that included Dinosaur National Monument could be spared. At the time, Brower was not familiar with the majestic beauty and prehistoric treasures of Glen Canyon, located over a hundred miles downstream from Dinosaur, and didn’t realize what he had bargained away. Later, when he finally saw the towering cliffs of the Glen with his own eyes, he fought hard to reverse the Sierra Club’s agreement to allow a dam at this site, even up to the day when the last chunk of concrete was placed across the river. For the rest of his life, he was consumed with guilt for the role he had played in the demise of one of the continent’s most stunning gems. I suspect that he also mourned the loss of a magical place that he scarcely got to explore.

When he passed away at age eighty-eight, his ashes were spread at a place that he loved in Yosemite National Park—but that is not necessarily where his spirit has chosen to stay. As I listened to the phantom’s footsteps, I pictured Brower dressed in his plaid collared hiking shirt and baggy shorts, his Sierra Club cup hanging from his belt, sloshing through the creek that he helped drown. Perhaps he occasionally wanders the side branches of the Glen, seeking atonement in the canyon he believed he betrayed. I wanted to catch up with him, commiserate with his pain, tell him that each of us can only do so much in defense of the natural world. I felt a fusion of past and present, of the environmental battles fought in the past and the water management disputes that are still waged today, of the lessons learned by my predecessors and those I will pass to my children.

I had barely conjured an image of Brower when the channel widened and we encountered the phantom at last. Ahead of us, a shelf of sandstone jutted out from the base of the cliff. Small waves lapped against the shelf’s lower surface —galumph, galumph, galumph. Even as we glided forward in our canoe, the cadence still possessed a human-like quality. We checked our surroundings but could find no obvious source of the waves—neither a gentle breeze nor the wake of a boat. We stared at the lapping waves in disbelief. My skin tingled. I felt myself in the presence of a spirit medium who, through the rhythmic splash of water against stone, had managed to connect us with long-departed souls. The canyon walls were complicit as well—they had tossed the sound from one cliff to another in a form of acoustic trickery. As a consequence, we had received a gift of pure magic—the dissolution of any boundary between the waters of the present and the creek of the past; between our modern maps and the cliff etchings that guided the ancients; between ourselves and the souls who still roamed beneath the lake.

We paddled beyond the mouth of the shadowed passageway into the sunshine of the main channel, into the present world of Lake Powell. The vastness of the lake all but swamped the intimacy of the canyon we had left behind. The sinuous, one hundred and eighty-five-mile reservoir had two thousand miles of shoreline, a current storage of thirteen million-acre feet of water, and an immense, chiseled landscape that took my breath away.

But eerily, I still sensed a parallel universe below me, a submerged world of willow thickets and beaver ponds and quiet pools where blue herons stalked. Somewhere beneath our canoe, cliffs were etched with petroglyphs and ledges held ancient homes. And there were spirits, too—spirits of people who still explored the side creeks of Glen Canyon. I was certain of this, because I had heard their footsteps.

 

Christina Devin Vojta is a writer and wildlife ecologist who currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Hawk and Handsaw and Belle Ombre, and her contributions to science have been published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Landscape Ecology.