CHAPTER XXII

SHORT OF PROVISIONS IN A SUNLESS GORGE

In the mud at Kanab Canyon we saw an old footprint of some person who had come down to the river through this narrow, gloomy gorge.  It was here that Major Powell terminated his second voyage, on account of extreme high water.  A picture they made showed their boats floated up in this side canyon.  Our stage was much lower than this.  F.S.  Dellenbaugh, the author of “A Canyon Voyage,” was a member of this second expedition.  This book had been our guide down to this point; we could not have asked for a better one.  Below here we had a general idea of the nature of the river, and had a set of the government maps, but we had neglected to provide ourselves with detailed information such as this volume gave us.

Evening of the following day found us at Cataract Creek Canyon, but with a stage of water in the river nearly fifty feet lower than that which we had seen a few years before.  The narrow entrance of this great canyon gives no hint of what it is like a few miles above.

The Indian village is in the bottom of a 3000-foot canyon, half a mile wide and three miles long, covered with fertile fields, peach and apricot orchards.  It even contained a few fig trees.  Below the village the canyon narrowed to a hundred yards, with a level bottom, covered with a tangle of wild grape vines, cactus, and cottonwood trees.  This section contained the two largest falls, and came to an end about four miles below the first fall.  Then the canyon narrowed, deep and gloomy, until there was little room for anything but the powerful, rapidly descending stream.  At the lower end it was often waist deep and fifteen or twenty feet wide.  It was no easy task to go through this gorge.  The stream had to be crossed several times.  The canyon terminated in an extremely narrow gorge 2500 feet deep, dark and gloomy, one of the most impressive gorges we have ever seen.  The main canyon was similar, with a few breaks on the sides, those breaks being ledges, or narrow sloping benches that would extend for miles, only to be brought to an abrupt end by side canyons.  There are many mountain-sheep in this section, but we saw none either time.  We could see many fresh tracks where they had followed these ledges around, and had gone up the narrow side canyon.  It was cold in the main canyon, and no doubt the sheep could be found on the plateaus, which were more open, and would get sun when the sun shone.  This plateau was 2500 feet above us.  At the turn of the canyon we could see the other walls 2000 feet above that.  The rapids in the section just passed had been widely separated and compared well with those of Marble Canyon, not the worst we had seen, but far from being tame.  There was plenty of shore room at each of these rapids.