National Geographic : 1996 Sep
A window in a red rock wall deep within Ventana Mesa opens the canyon beyond to sunlight, making an exclamationpoint of light and shadow that changes shape with the slow rise of the sun. VENTANA MESA, ARIZONA (NAVAJO: TL'OH Y(CHII-MESA OF RED GRASSES) winding dirt road from the town of Shiprock. "The only way to feel the country is to pause in it," he wrote. "I'm not one of those . .. fanatics who think everything can be solved by seeing, hearing, and knowing nothing. But in the desert it's likely to occur to you that our daily lives in the cities are full of seeing, hearing, and worrying over a great many things that are of no damn consequence whatever." To the comfort of solitude add pure joy in the existence of incompara ble beauty, for this landscape is an ancient geologic battlefield scarred by the wounds of time and littered with the detritus of unimaginable violence. Successive waves of sedimentation have given it multicolored plateaus and mesas of sandstones and limestones and shales. Mountain building has given it the San Juans of Colorado. Volcanism blew the tops off the San Francisco peaks in Arizona. In Utah, bubbles of magma forced the land above them to blister into huge laccoliths like the Abajo Mountains and the great mound of Navajo Mountain. Diatremes, gas charged eruptions of magma, left towering volcanic remnants like Ship Rock in northwest New Mexico. The final touches in shaping all this tumbling-down and shoving-up country have been the work of weather and erosion-wind-driven sand to help mold the rocks into unearthly forms, temperature fluctuations so great they fracture exposed stone, peeling slabs from it like ice calving off a glacier, and the rivers, always the rivers in this arid land, doing their eternal work of carrying the land to the sea, bit by bit. The San Juan, the Dolores, the Virgin, the Escalante, the Dirty Devil, about a dozen more, most feeding into the great stem of the Colorado, have written their signatures into the ever rising stone. They have carved some of the most impressive canyon systems to be found anywhere on the planet: Dark Canyon, Marble Canyon, Grand Canyon, and many, many more, their names like starred entries in time's encyclopedia of immutable change. A place of earthly trauma, then, where the forces of time have created scenes that inspire awe and get people to musing about the pitiful insig nificance of their own lives. But there are gentler moments too, sudden surprises of life, as I discovered more than ten years ago in a little-known place near the Arizona-Utah border called Water Canyon. The spot is not on most maps, and our group of hikers had to be guided to it by a pair of local lads from Colorado City. The higher we climbed up the bed of the creek that had made the place, the more narrow the canyon became, red rock walls closing in on both sides, opening up every now and then into elegant little alcoves of beautifully sculptured stone swirled with maroon and ivory bands, the creek's white banks as smooth and unmarked as a beach at dawn, ferns clustered in dark wet corners, trickles of water and bright green swatches of moss oozing down the rock faces. All this was cool and lovely and inviting, but nothing I had not T. H. WATKINS, editor of Wilderness magazine, is the author of numerous books, including Stone Time: Southern Utah, a Portraitand a Meditation. ADRIEL HEISEY, a former pilot for the Navajo Nation, lives in Tucson, Arizona. This is his first article for the GEOGRAPHIC.