Grand Ambitions

...continued.

The elderly gentleman was bundled tight in a heavy woolen coat. Gleaming with whiskers, his creased and wrinkled face was framed with a blonde wool cap. In a manner casual and polite, he led me easily into conversation. He did not own the ranch but his involvement with it had begun before the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960's. When I told him of my excursions he became distracted and soon was reminiscing about earlier years when he brought groups across the lava field to the rim for overnight stays in the shed built there.

He said that the two men doing "touch and go's" behind him were missionaries practicing their landing skills for an upcoming assignment overseas. During the warmer months it would be impossible to tie up the runway with such things. The lodge was a staging area for tourists completing and starting rafting trips. The old rancher explained that it took eight days to raft through the canyon from Lee's Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam, to Lake Mead - the legacy of Hoover Dam. For those seeking shorter trips this was the break up point. It was not uncommon during the busy months to find ten aircraft on the runway and five circling. Two helicopters, one rented out of California, shuttled the people to and from a landing pad on the river. I cringed at the thought of the chop of rotors and the whine of turbines rattling through the canyon.

"Takes a bit of fuel," he laughed. "Nip'n tuck all the way git'n that tank a gas in here," he said, nodding to the tanker truck behind me.

"What was it like before the dam went in?" I asked.

"Summer flows were four-fold what they're now. Winter it git so low you could walk across. Jus 'bout dry up."

The canyon was certainly not an oddity or a fluke of nature. I could imagine the Colorado, under such sudden and tremendous flows, scouring the rock dramatically as it dropped 13,000 feet to sea level from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains. Today only a few rivers could boast rapids of equal ire. Before the dams, flows equaled that of the Mississippi.