Glen Canyon Odyssey

A Glen Canyon Odyssey

A remote country out of a time past

The put-in point, Hite: a hundred miles of rough road from the paved roads near Green River or Montcello, through virtually uninhabited country, often washed out and impassable. Hite Ferry: also primitive–and the phone to call over to the ferry tender across the river is a wooden box with a crank ringer on the right and an ear horn on the end of a long wire on the left.

Escalante Canyon near Hole in the Rock, June 1961. The two figures in the sunlight seen climbing the nearby ridge at the far left are about to get lost. Thus starts a saga...
We had just spent the late afternoon down on the Escalante River waiting for sunset before starting the four mile trek across the mesa. That sun was hot! The air was hot. We were hot. We had discussed the route back to the Microbus, which was parked on the edge of a prominent, low mesa: easy to see for miles. I had left my map under the shelter before crossing the Escalante and putting on my shoes to start up the slickrock ledge out of the canyon. I asked one of the two who were about to get lost to pick it up for me, and I started out. Those two hikers now have the only map in our party of twelve explorers. When I took this picture, I noted that the two were in the picture and taking a slightly different route than I had taken. (Look at the bottom of the subsequent pages for the continuation of this saga.)

Our Glen Canyon Saga appears on these Odyssey pages in hidden font -- select to see or use Ctrl-a.

"AGlen Canyon Odyssey" is our suggestion for a Web effort to show the world the magic of Glen Canyon. It's a magic that exists in 2004 only as a trace of something that was. In 1962, it was a place that too few knew. Too few to prevent the destruction of something so far beyond normal human experience that communication to those without the experience always failed.
It was not a place that no one knew. There were dozens of us. Some of us are still around. We have memories. We have photos. ...and today we have the World Wide Web. Let us share what we have...through the Web.
Katie, Gudrun, Sam, Chris, Ed, and all you others. How about it?
There are also explorers out there who are discovering the trace of what's left, and what they are discovering they know to be magical beyond anything they expected. Places that were virtually impossible to access are now just difficult to access. A few are now easy to access. Let's combine our memories and photos via the magic of interlinking our Web sites into a Web ring and show each other -- and the world -- The Place Too Few Knew.

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