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History in the Glen
| Upper Glen is rich in ruins. Mining
ruins. Oil drilling ruins. Anaszi ruins. There are deserted,
decaying little log cabins. A caterpillar tractor. Carts.
A plastic Xmas tree on a wooden table in front of a cabin. Broken
chairs. The Stanton placer gold dredge lying broken and sunk on its
side near the left bank. There are Anasazi houses in cliffs.
Anasazi steps up cliffs (“Moki steps”). Grain storage pits–often
with round, fitted rock covers. A mysterious rock-lined square well
less than a foot on a side. And wall after wall of petroglyphs–the
literature of a lost language from an almost forgotten culture.
The gold dredge failed because the gold was too fine. The planned railroad down Glen was never started. The oil field was a flop. The river crossing at Hole-in-the-Rock was used only that once. Nemo disappeared into the labyrinthine canyons of the Escalante, never to be heard from again. |
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GLEN
CANYONEERS: PLEASE CONSIDER
HOW TO LINK TO YOUR SITE HERE.
Naturally, we all wanted to know what had happened. The hiker who had headed for Escalante didn't have a very coherent story to tell. The girl who had cooly waited out the heat had a clear story to tell:
They had soon come
across a red walled canyon as they headed for the airstrip mesa.
Her male companion remembered seeing a red walled canyon earlier that day:
while in the Escalante we had hiked down to the mouth of Clear Creek, which
had high red walls. Since we had not hiked into Davis Gulch—we had
gone all the way up to Soda Gulch to see Gregory Natural Bridge—and had
paid no attention to Davis as we passed it, he concluded the red-walled
canyon must be Clear Creek. He recalled that Clear Creek was to the
east and concluded that they must have somehow crossed Clear Creek.
He took the map from the girl, studied it, and they then tried to get back
across to the west side of "Clear Creek." (Remember, we had discussed
the extraordinary character of these slot canyons and had stressed that
it was virtually impossible to cross them except by rope and rock bolts.)
They had spent the evening trying to cross "Clear Creek" (actually Davis
Gulch), spent the night in a rock shelter, and resumed pushing Davis Gulch
the next day. She took shelter. He finally pushed the east
side of Davis Gulch all the way to the road and headed to the west, the
direction he was incorrectly assuming was the way toward the rest of us.
They had, during the night, seen the light from our fire and parking light
and concluded that it must be a cabin.