The Klondike Bar Sheep Trail 
Mile 66.4 right bank

This view from above looking upstream reveals the jumble of Navajo sandstone slickrock that lines the banks of the Colorado River for most of the lower three-fourths of Glen Canyon.  You can not traverse this slickrock parallel to the river.  Should you start walking toward that butte up there off the end of the Kaiparowitz Plateau, you would get no more than about 100 yards.  Then you would come to the edge of Driftwood Canyon at the top of an overhanging wall.  The floor of Driftwood is several hundred feet below you.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Navajo Indians built the trail by chipping steps out of the slickrock, drilling holes, and placing fence posts in the holes which they then used to hold brush to hide the cliffs below from the eyes of the sheep.

Cairn above Klondike Bar

Some river boater once sat here looking across the Colorado River into a boundless fairyland of Mother Nature's sandstone sculpture and built a whimsical monument.  Did he, or she, have any notion of what was about to happen to that surreal wonderland?

Almost certainly not.  The destruction of this place was inconceivable to those who had experienced its wonders.  And today, the place—and its experience—is inconceivable to those who never knew it, for this is a place of unique experience.  Truly unique.

One by one, those fortunate few who had become intimate with this Eden, this meeting of life with a paradise of sensuous stone, eventually came to face the terrible truth, and one by one the shock drove a spike of sorrow into their hearts.

We recognized him from chance meetings all over the West.  It was "Whitey," the husband of Georgie White, "The Woman of the Rivers."  He was in shock.

It was the shock of meeting up with a reality that was simply too horrible to face:  Glen Canyon was really going to be destroyed, leaving only that higher-elevation portion we came to know as "not even run-of-the-mill Glen Canyon spectacular."

And nobody in the future would ever know the real Glen, or even be able to begin to understand what it was like, because Lake Powell would open up to easy access only that higher-elevation Glen which anywhere else would be mind blowingly spectacular.

But in the Glen was not worth our time.

The exquisite place that was the Glen was visibly being drowned: As we sat on the hot rubber we could see substantial progress of the drowning.  The flood water visibly crept up the creek bed.

Shortly, a woman came walking slowly down Aztec Creek, looking as morose as we felt.  It was Georgie.  She had taken a group of her tourists up toward Rainbow, but she didn't have the heart to be with a flock of tourists just then.  She pointed them up Bridge Creek and told them she would be waiting at the boats when they returned.

So, the four of us sat on the hot pontoons and exchanged stories of what was drawing to a close before our eyes.  We all agreed: the truth was so tragic, so horrible, that it had been, for the past year or two, something our minds would not let us face.

We watched that horror for hours.  It sank in slowly and inexorably.  And Glen sank into the past, a victim of simplistic engineering and of ignorance of that place almost noone knew.
 
 

Sylvia Tone (Toni), a frequent traveller with Georgie in Glen and Grand.  She wrote about a trip to Lake Powell, after Glen was gone:

"Last spring, I made the mistake of taking the boat trip on Lake Powell, to what were once Aztec and Bridge Canyons and walked  to Rainbow.  We were herded along by the guides like a bunch of sheep, not allowed to leave the trail or go to the little cottonwood and spring under the bridge.  I was more than depressed and told my friends.  Powell was a dead world.  Deadness is the only word that describes it.  Not a flower or a leaf or tree or little lizard, and being old and emotional and sick at heart, I cried."