Havasupai Country

For nine days in February, along with fifteen students, three fellow teachers, and one alumnus from my school, I journeyed over a thousand miles, by van and on foot, from Las Vegas to Havasu Canyon to the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon to Zion Canyon and back to Las Vegas. It was our school's Winterim, during which time teachers lead students on various excursions -- from France to Guatemala to community service projects in the Tacoma region to college trips to backpacking and camping trips such as ours. My group gathered backpacking gear and flew from Seatac Airport to Las Vegas, where we rented a caravan of passenger vans and drove across the Hoover Dam toward our first night's lodging in a motel in Kingman, Arizona, which served as a staging area for our journey to the rim of Havasu Canyon the following day.

Havasu Canyon is a tributary of the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon's western part. The trail head, Hualapai Hilltop, overlooks the canyon from a vantage point more than 6,000 feet above sea level. As we closed our packs and hefted them to our shoulders, we could see snow from a recent storm brightening the shadows and setting off the lineaments of the north-facing buttes and sandstone cliffs, tawny and rust-colored landforms jutting into the clear sky, the bluest of blue. After descending two or three miles of relatively steep switchbacks, the trail eased into an open canyon that narrowed with each step along the six or seven mile walk into the village of the Havasupai Indians, who have lived and farmed in the canyon for thousands and thousands of years. Here, where the trail enters the village, the luminescent blue water of Havasu Creek flows into the canyon. We were greeted with views of old and new homes, yards with ramshackle fences surrounding horses and donkeys and mules and cows and the occasional goat, quite a few friendly dogs moving untethered and free, and gentle smiles on the faces of the Havasupai people.

The contrasts between the suburbs of Tacoma, where most of the students on our trip live, and the Havasupai Reservation, which depends largely on horse, donkey, and mule trains to bring in supplies and carry out mail and refuse, tells of two Americas: the America of egregious consumption, running on gasoline, credit, and greed; and the America of its indigenous, sovereign peoples, who live distinctly on the margins. The Havasupai people, for the most part, still inhabit their ancestral homeland: Havasu Canyon is remote and difficult to access, on land that happens to have no minerals to mine or forests to clear cut.

On our third day there, we hiked down to the Colorado River, following a route that meandered around and through pool after pool of turquoise blue water. We camped in the cottonwoods between two grand waterfalls, where we had a great view of the lunar eclipse during the night of February 20th -- the darkened full moon, filtered down to the color of blood by the earth's umbra, heightened the brilliance of the stars. And in the light of the preceding day, you could see cottonwood trees crowned with green buds, the grasses and early flowers breaking thick and lush through the soil’s winter crust.

After leaving Havasupai land, we drove through a full-on blizzard as we passed by the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, so our views were limited to a frenzy of snowflakes veiling ghostly shapes. We drove on through the storm across the Navajo Reservation toward Ruby's Inn and Bryce Canyon N.P. in southern Utah that afternoon, then hiked a loop in Bryce the following morning as the storm cleared -- it was magical swishing through crystals from one of those fabled desert snowfalls, amid almost unearthly colors and weird shapes called "hoodoos" -- like the lumpy towers of sand castles, pink and orange and red and hundreds of feet tall, drizzled through the fingers of giants, pointing toward clouds breaking to a deep blue sky.

We then drove to Zion N.P. -- all but two of our fifteen students ventured with two co-leaders and me toward Angel's Landing, a grand sandstone fin jutting about 1700 feet above the Virgin River below. We broke trail through the snow to within 100 meters or so of the top, but it became too treacherous to proceed, clutching as we were to chains and handrails the park service installed back in the 30s to aid climbing. Zion was absolutely amazing - I'd never seen so much snow there; the cliffs were heaped with white quilts, festooned with mighty icicles and silver strands of waterfalls; several of the waterfalls disintegrated into mist as they dropped a thousand vertical feet in free fall!