Flaming Gorge

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Flaming Gorge had been sitting up there, 40 miles away, the entire summer without my paying it a single visit. Just the name itself is enticing. Yesterday I finally made the drive up from the valley, past Steinaker and Red Fleet reservoirs, on to the plateau further north.

View down into the valley near where I live:

Mostly, I came to hike. The sky was bright blue, sun was shining, and I had a trail map. But first things first, gotta see the dam. I understand the thought process and reasoning for building dams... the west is dry and overpopulated. People need water and they need it to be there even during years of drought. People also like electricity, and the turbines like this one at Flaming Gorge,

that spin in perpetuum at the base of these dams produce enough electricity to power a city of 32,000 people. And I must admit the engineering feat of constructing a giant concrete wall that safely and successfully holds back billions of gallons of water is enough to flutter the heart with national pride.

But the cost of doing such a thing, in my perspective, is unforgivable. For recreation and electricity and water, we trade the extinction of entire fish species. We drown miles and miles of exquisite canyon walls, displacing land animals and destroying archeological sites. So many of the little side canyons and tributaries that Powell named on his course down the Green and the Grand are lost forever. I'm not doing a good job of this, Edward Abbey says it best about dams:

The beavers had to go and build another goddamned dam on the Colorado. Not satisfied with the enormous silt trap and evaporation tank called Lake Mead (back of Boulder Dam) they have created another even bigger, even more destructive, in Glen Canyon. This reservoir of stagnant water will not irrigate a single square foot of land or supply water for a single village; its only justification is the generation of cash through electricity for the indirect subsidy of various real estate speculators, cottongrowers and sugarbeet magnates in Arizona, Utah and Colorado; also, of course, to keep the engineers and managers of the Reclamation Bureau off the streets and out of trouble.

The impounded waters form an artificial lake named Powell, supposedly to honor but actually to dishonor the memory, spirit and vision of Major John Wesley Powell, first American to make a systematic exploration of the Colorado Riiver and its environs. Where he and his brave men once lined the rapids and glided through silent canyons two thousand feet deep the motorboats now smoke and whine, scumming the water with cigarette butts, beer cans and oil, dragging the water skiers on their endless rounds, clockwise.

PLAY SAFE, read the official signboards; SKI ONLY IN CLOCKWISE DIRECTION; LET'S ALL HAVE FUN TOGETHER! With regulations enforced by water cops in government uniforms. Sold. Down the river.

Once it was different there. I know, for I was one of the lucky few (there could have been thousands more) who saw Glen Canyon before it was drowned. In fact I saw only a part of it but enough to realize that here was an Eden, a portion of the earth's original paradise. To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible. With this difference: those man-made celebrations of human aspiration could conceivably be reconstructed while Glen Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable, which can never be recovered through any human agency.

I am strongly opposed to dams. But I took the tour anyway. Here she is:

We went down 800 feet inside the dam to the base of it to feed the rainbow trout and other transplanted fish who now live out their entire lives right at this spot. Seriously, the tour guide said that these fish do not migrate any further down the river because they have all the food they can get from tourists like me who giddily put quarters into chumpy fish food dispensers. Eight free meals a day! They sure were ravenous...

On one side of the dam, the now-regulated Green River flows happily along its entrenched course:

On the other side, we have this:

The Flaming Gorge bathtub!

Despite the destruction of nature that it is... I must say I enjoyed myself. The views were stunning, the wildlife ever-present, the scents of pinyon pine, juniper, and sage, sublime. If I could bottle one scent, to carry with me forever in rememberance of a place, it would be these three combined. One whiff and I'm transported back to every hike this summer. Sensory overload. Pure, high desert bliss.

I drove over to the Red Canyon visitor's center and hiked 5 miles of the Red Canyon Rim trail, an easy jaunt of a trail with practically no elevation change and some spectacular views. The weather started changing as soon as I set out, the clouds weighed dark and heavy above but there was no thunder, so I kept going. The suddenly cool temperatures were peeeeerfect. Didn't see another person on the trail for the entire 5 miles, but instead got to quietly pass by 5 deer who were grazing between the trees. Two of them got skittish, crossed the trail in front of me, and bounded off. The other three would only lift their heads to watch me. Existential epiphanies when encountering a non-human creature who is watching you as intently and curiously as you are it...

While on the trail, I perched on a rock to eat and read parts of The Immense Journey. The birds were swooping and soaring all around me. Nowhere in the world have I ever been so startled by birds as here in Dinosaur country. You can be hanging out at a viewpoint or sitting on a cliff and suddenly, something that sounds like the dull crack of a whip goes thundering by: turkey vultures, osprey, hawks, falcons, even golden eagles. I have near heart-attacks when the growling drum of a hummingbird zooms into my airspace out of absolutely nowhere, to hover and stare at the colors on my clothes. Love it.

Sat with my feet dangling above the trees for almost an hour:

Right next to this fellow who was growing straight up out of a ROCK:

Afterwards, I took a drive, tried to go on the Sheep Creek Geological Loop, but the road was awful and I am hyper-paranoid about my car's tires at the moment, and it was pouring rain, so I turned around after five miles of potholes.

The colors and trees got me so high. Felt like Vermont in October.

Big horn sheep!

The river is running to the south; the mountains have an easterly and westerly trend directly athwart its course, yet it glides on in a quiet way as if it thought a mountain range no formidable obstruction. It enters the range by a flaring, brilliant red gorge, that may be seen from the north a score of miles away. The great mass of the mountain ridge through which the gorge is cut is composed of bright vermilion rocks; but they are surmounted by broad bands of mottled buff and gray,and these bands come down with a gentle curve to the water's edge on the nearer slope of the mountain.This is the head of the first of the canyons we are about to explore--an introductory one to a series made by the river through this range. We name it Flaming Gorge. -John Wesley Powell