 |
 Hidden
Passage, June 1961. On air search for lost hikers. |
The air shuttle
| If you do the car shuttle, you’ve got
many hundreds of miles of driving, most of it over poor roads. A
second shuttle is needed at the lower end; between the take-out point at
Kane Creek and the Page airport.
Then the flight to Hite! Nothing can prepare you for what you see. Vertical walls everywhere near the river and streams. Canyons that are thin, twisted saw-cuts in red sandstone. Natural bridges and arches everywhere. And truly desolate stair-stepped desert mesas everywhere. Domes, ridges, and needles of spectacular rock. Plus a river lined with greenery. |
|
Hidden
Passage, June 1961. On air search for lost hikers. |
GLEN
CANYONEERS: PLEASE CONSIDER
HOW TO LINK TO YOUR SITE HERE.
Morning dawned
and we were still short two explorers. We sent out search parties,
and, since we were camped at the end of a remote air strip, we placed an
"SOS" shaped from brush near the Microbus. The search parties found
no one, but a small airplane spotted the vehicle and the message and landed.
It was a ranger from the newly formed Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
and a pilot from Page Aviation. They had been attracted not to our
"SOS" but to the vehicle sitting next to the air strip, an air strip which
they might need to use, preferably without impediments such as vehicles
nearby. In moments, I and the ranger and pilot were up in the air
to look for our missing party. I was astonished by what I saw from
that airplane. As spectacular as was what we had seen in a day hiking
down to the Colorado at Hole-in-the-Rock and a day in the Escalante, from
the air I could see that there were hundreds of square miles of Earth's
most spectacular canyonlands. Enormous smooth, decorated sandstone
surfaces, many of which were vertical, extended as far as the eye could
see and in all directions. We found no missing persons.