Magnificent Possession
Who's to Protect What's Left of the West?
BY JAMES CONAWAY
The vermillion cliffs are a spectacular
geological continuum extending all the way from the
Grand Canyon in northern Arizona to the Escalante
Mountains in southern Utah. Imagine a vast arc of
flaming rock with the Colorado River at one end and
the Utah border at the other, the cliffs' deep
crimsons and magentas running along 25 miles of eternally
stressed sandstone.
The cliffs can be seen from state highway Alternate
89, which takes the low road from Page, Ariz., to
Kanab, Utah, once the southern hub of the Mormons'
land of Deseret. This is the so-called Arizona Strip,
cut off from southern access by the millennial crack
of the canyon, as rich in prehistory as it is in geology,
with distant plateaus with old Piute names—Shivwit,
Uinkaret, Kaibab. Wind and water shaped them, the
broad valleys silver-green with sagebrush and juniper,
and the high forested tablelands of confusing, sometimes
frightening aspect.
Atop the Vermillion Cliffs sits the Paria Plateau,
named for the ancient occupiers of this back pocket
of the West. The Paria have been gone from this landscape
for roughly a thousand years, but they and other Native
Americans left behind artifacts and ghostly remains
of dwellings that serve as a palimpsest of ancient
civilizations, if only you have eyes to see them.
Peter W. Bungart, an archaeologist, does. He explained
that the Ancient Puebloans, once referred to as Anasazi
("ancient enemies" in Navajo), arrived c.
300 B.C. and introduced agriculture. "They made
pottery," he said, "because they were growing
squash, corn, and beans, which required pots."
He was standing on a sloping shoulder of the plateau,
still under the Vermillion Cliffs. In shorts and brimmed
canvas hat, a pack on his back containing lunch (bread
and avocados), topo maps, a battery-run global positioning
system (GPS) device, and other tools of the itinerant
student of the long gone, Bungart looked like a day
hiker. All around us, in red sand under blue sky,
lay some of the pottery shards as well as knapped
flint and smooth stones used as tools that had been
cast in their millions by the elements and by various
peoples across thousands of square miles.
For more of this article, look for the
May/June 2006
issue on newsstands or e-mail
us to purchase a copy.
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