As the sun angles higher, I turn onto a dirt road and park the truck below a line of imposing cliffs. My friends Tony Williams and Mary Allen pull in next to me. We've come to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to investigate a dinosaur tracksite somewhere in the rocks above. Below the site lies what may be the only known prehistoric pictograph of a dinosaur track.
Reaching the first cliff, we head up a narrow ledge as a raven shoots overhead and disappears into the blue. Talus covers a series of stairstep ledges leading to a vertical face. We take turns climbing the cliff and soon reach the top of an escarpment a thousand feet above the flats. The three of us cross the rimrock and begin finding tracks sunk in the stone with the claw marks clearly visible. These ancient prints are enormous; the most distinct impression measures more than seventeen-inches long. At least two dozen of them cover the surface of red sandstone, and one trackway leads straight to the cliff edge and keeps going. The imagination follows.
Prehistoric Indians would have studied these footprints with intense interest. Since their lives depended on their ability to read tracks, they would have observed how this animal walked on two legs and estimated its size and weight. They probably concluded the tracks belonged to an unknown creature, something birdlike and truly mythic in scale.
Paleontologists now suspect the tracks came from the Dilophosaurus, a powerful bipedal carnivore standing about eight-feet tall and reaching eighteen feet in length. Capable of sudden bursts of speed, the dinosaur hunted in packs along the banks of meandering rivers. The first fossil prints discovered in America likely came from Dilophosaurus. In 1802 a boy named Pliny Moody plowed up a sandstone slab on his father’s farm in Massachusetts. On it he found the tracks of a strange, three-toed creature and hauled the rock home for a doorstop, where most conversation pieces ended up in those days. Curious neighbors debated whether the birdlike prints had been left by a hefty turkey or Noah’s raven.
Reverend Edward Hitchcock, a professor at Amherst College, heard about the Noah’s Raven slab and collected it for the Pratt museum. Hitchcock was the greatest fossil tracker of his time, and throughout his life continued to insist these prints came from extinct species of giant birds, not dinosaurs. Inspired by American Indian tales of the Thunderbird, he named the prints Eubrontes giganteus, meaning “great thunderer.” Over the years, attempts to trace the origins of birds and dinosaurs have been tangled in controversy and outright hoaxes. But many scientists hold the theory that modern birds evolved from certain theropod dinosaurs. Hitchcock’s classifications no longer appear as farfetched as they once did.
With these discoveries, Hitchcock found himself living in a world of deep geological time where entire species had become extinct. And the remnants of this ancient world could not be explained by Noah’s flood alone. He summed up his discovery of fossil tracks in a report to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848.
“I have gone back into those immensely remote ages, and watched those shores along which these enormous and heteroclitic beings walked. Now I have seen, in scientific vision, an apterous bird, some twelve or fifteen feet high, – large flocks of them, – walking over the muddy surface, followed by many others of analogous character, but of smaller size. . . . Beyond, half seen amid the darkness, there move along animals so strange that they can hardly be brought within the types of existing organization. Strange, indeed, is this menagerie of remote sandstone days.”
A short distance below the rim, we make our way to an overhang covered with more than seventy-five pictographs. The central figure of this rock art panel is a three-toed track painted red, about a foot long, and instantly recognizable. It clearly depicts one of the fossil tracks we had seen above. Possibly unique, this ancient pictograph may be the oldest known recording of dinosaur footprints in North America.
The painted track resembles a bird with outstretched wings, and additional pictographs of stylized birds reinforce the motif. One has a triangle for each wing, while other bird figures are standing or shown in flight. The inspiration for the painted images came from the rock itself, from the hard evidence lying right in front of the painter. The rock art represents an attempt by people long ago to come to terms with the fact of an earlier and much stranger world.
Looking closer, we can see pictographs of people converging on the track from each side. Some of them has their hands raised as if venerating it. Or they may be dancing before it, another way of praying. “It looks,” Mary says, “like they are paying homage to the track.”
On our way back, we stop at a lower panel of petroglyphs. A bird-footed figure can be seen with clawed hands sprouting extra talons, producing a wild, branching effect much like the antlers of an elk. In some images the boundary between bird and human has blurred, making it hard to say if the figures are birdmen or birds with human attributes. At a certain level of abstraction it may not matter.
In 1882 Smithsonian ethnographer Frank Cushing recorded a Hopi emergence story at Oraibi. “Although all the waters had flowed away,” a clan leader told Cushing, “all the earth was damp and soft, hence it is that we may see to this day, between this place toward the westward and the place whence we came out, the tracks of men and many strange creatures; for the earth has since changed to stone and all the tracks are preserved as when they were first made.”
Noah’s Raven
WS Merwin
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment, I never made promises.
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Archaic: Kanab Canyon, Arizona
I roll over again as all the painted images of the day resurface. They cover the rock wall the way tracks crisscross the sand, revealing all the roamings of a night in a single glance. The human mind leaves traces of its passing, the images braiding together the way thoughts do. At one time the meaning of these old paintings was as clear as a claw mark, the drag of a tail, or the brush of a wing thrown into relief by the morning sun. At one time you could trail the thought of the artist to where the wind is always on the verge of rising and the rain about to fall.
click thumbnails to see larger images
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River: Colorado: Grand Canyon, Arizona
Voyage of the Death Star
Running blind
By the end of March, 1981, Jim Evans and Mark Scanlon had a pair of Death Stars ready to launch. The make-shift rafts were designed to hold the boatmen, enough beer to last the duration, and an Irish setter named Boomer. Their plan was simple: Push off without a permit, float through the Grand Canyon on some of the biggest whitewater anywhere, and exit undetected two weeks later.
Evans, who worked as a logger, thought a sneak trip was an absolutely great idea. “No waiting list," he said, "no rules. Bring the dog, sure! Don’t bother to bring your i.d.! No one’s going to be checking i.d.s at 3:00 am.”
Late at night they slipped down to the Colorado River below Lees Ferry with the headlights off. Closing the doors quietly, they set the rafts in the water and quickly loaded the rocket boxes and coolers. At the core of each craft were two inner tubes, about six feet in diameter, salvaged from a skidder. They supported a welded metal frame and a pair of heavy oars. Nothing was tied down; they would take care of the details later. Someone forget the bow lines; no problem, they’d also handle that downriver. But Evans did remember to bring a scanner. If the rangers began to close in once they were in the canyon, his plan was to sink the boats and escape on foot.
"My heart’s racing," he said, "as we made the fastest put-in in the history of the Colorado. Mark was gone into the inky blackness. I put the dog in place on the beer cooler and shoved off." Evans immediately got turned around, thinking the river flowed the other way. "It was dark, I couldn’t see anything, but I could see by the lights of the truck leaving that I was going to the right. So I thought, ‘Goody, I’m in an eddy!’ You want to chill before you blast off down the river.” The boatman used the moment to finish rigging, and a moment was all he had.
“First thing I tried was my oars,” he said. Carved from wood the night before, the handles didn’t work. “The oars were useless. No big deal, I’d solve that problem later but not in the middle of the night. So I’m drifting along, checking things out. The next thing you know I’ve come to the Paria riffle, and I’m not very far from the shore. I start hitting rocks and spray’s flying. The boat’s spinning around! Jesus Christ, something’s wrong! There was nothing to do but try not to get crushed by the rocket boxes.” As Evans bounced through the rocky shallows, he realized his mistake. “That’s where I learned which way the river really flows."
Rapid, Boomer, rapid!
Next day Scanlon let the current draw him toward House Rock Rapid. “He’s cool,” said Evans, who was watching from shore. “Most people would be flailing at the oars. He’s super cool. It was awesome to see – Mark and the Death Star. Wow, it was glorious!” In an instant he was heading straight for a tremendous hole. “I saw him going in, then lost him.” The raft flipped and Scanlon bobbed downriver. As he disappeared, Evans gave him a thumbs up and shouted, “Hasta la vista!”
Then it was his turn. Boomer, wearing a child’s life jacket, sat on the cooler as Evans pushed off. “It looked like I was going to eat it. I turned sideways and did everything I could to miss the hole, and I hit half of it. The dog bounced off, and the life jacket wrapped around its back legs. So he spent the rest of the rapid swimming with his head under the water. I finally pulled him back toward the boat and got him back on." The life jacket was never used again, but the incident took its toll. Whenever someone shouted, “Rapid, Boomer, rapid!” the dog would start to shake and quiver.
Evans rejoined Scanlon in an eddy below, and they inventoried the damage: two metal oars at the bottom of the river and the contents of the cooler gone. No steak, no hot dogs, and – no beer. Fighting panic at the thought of a river trip without beer, they bolted the boats together and rigged the remaining oars to steer a single, reconfigured Death Star. “From then on,” Evans said, “we were joined at the hip.”
As sometimes happens, what the river takes the river gives back. Not far below House Rock they spotted some shiny objects floating in an eddy. “Brewskis!” Evans shouted. “A whole case. We would find four or five in every eddy and think, ‘Might as well drink them as save them. Drink them before you lose them!' And we found an incredible amount. It amazed me, but you just can’t have too many.”
When they finished the beer, out came a bottle of rum. They passed it back and forth until it slipped through their hands and into the river. Half their remaining supply of booze had just disappeared. But before they could properly mourn the loss, the effects of the alcohol they had already consumed kicked in. What happened next no one remembered clearly, but by the time they hit the Roaring Twenties, boatmen and boat dog were stretched across the tubes. “I only woke up for rapids,” Evan recalled, “and wouldn’t have woken up then except it was so noisy.”
Their plan was to pass Phantom Ranch at night to avoid getting busted. But having lost track of where they were, the boatmen found themselves drifting stark naked past the tourists. “Do you know where Horn Creek is?” Evans shouted to surprised hikers on the footbridge and sunbathers at the foot of Bright Angel Trail. No one had a clue, but soon Horn Creek Rapid found them. At this stage of the journey, they made no attempt to scout it.
“We stopped checking out rapids,” he said, “because it didn’t make any difference one way or another.” All he remembered was going through “a big waterfall down and up,” where the frame bent and punctured a tube. “It was all an adventure to me,” Evans added. “It was the first time I’d been down the river.”
Mutiny
After making repairs, they pushed on. One day flowed into another as the boatmen were forced to run from dawn until dark to make their scheduled rendezvous at Diamond Creek. Finally, with the end almost in sight, Boomer mutinied. Evans and Scanlon pulled into a beach a few miles above the takeout, and when it was time to go the dog ran the other direction. Evans figured Boomer planned to desert the expedition, the way three of John Wesley Powell’s men had done. “That was it,” Evans said; “the dog had it. We had to grab him and drag him in the boat. I told him, ‘No whining, climb aboard!’”
The outlaw trip reached the takeout on the fourteen day, ending the voyage. And at midnight two friends rattled down the Diamond Creek road to shuttle them away before park rangers or Hualapai Indians could begin asking embarrassing questions. They loaded four people, two dogs, and an entire river trip in a Subaru station wagon and headed up the rough dirt road to Peach Springs.
Rumors of the episode made the rounds of the river crowd, growing with each retelling. And even years later whenever anyone said the word “rapid,” old Boomer would start to shiver and shake, reliving his wild ride on the Death Star.
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