ANTELOPE GIRL – Chapter 7

Mary Malone drove her USFWS Ford 150 north out of Flagstaff into the rising sun. It was already a hot summer day in Canyon Country with the temperature pushing ninety. She smiled as she dropped down the long hill that was the demarcation line between evergreen trees and the high desert. It was sometimes hard to believe she got paid to have so much fun. 

She soon passed the turnoff to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and entered the Land of the Navajo, a burnt orange expanse of glorious emptiness intermingled with green sage, small herds of sheep, and spectacular redrock. There were no stores or signs of humans other than the occasional hogan, most surrounded by junk and looking as unoccupied as the spooky death hogans that had been abandoned when someone died inside. As she drove along, the Vermillion Cliffs closed in on the highway like a red wall with the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon somewhere out there hidden to her left. Mary loved her long commute to work.

Highway 89 led her past the road to Wupatki National Monument. Wupatki, Tall House in Hopi, was first settled in 500 AD by the Cohonina and Kayenta peoples. A population explosion followed the eruption of the Sunset Crater volcano in the 11th century, with people drawn by the improvement the rich volcanic ash made to the soil. The name Wupatki came from the multistory Sinagua pueblo with over 100 rooms and the northernmost ballcourt so far discovered in North America. Many smaller structures were scattered throughout the area, covering fifty square miles, and archaeologists estimated there had been at least 2,000 people living around Wupatki in 1100 AD. After that, drought, like what the west was now experiencing, made it harder to survive, and by 1225 AD, the village complex had been abandoned. Yet another mystery surrounding the Ancient Ones.

A few miles later, Mary passed Gray Mountain, a small Navajo settlement with a Thrift Way gas station and a cluster of rundown houses. Most people pushed on to Flagstaff rather than stop at Gray Mountain, so there was usually very little activity, other than at the Navajo Chapter House where the locals gathered to do business and share the latest gossip. Just to the north of town was the curious Gray Mountain Bible Church, looking like a lush oasis in the desert. The Christians never tired of trying to convert the red heathens to the Jesus Way.

Next up was the intersection with busy Highway 64, otherwise known as the Desert View Road, leading to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. As always, Mary laughed at the sight of the solitary Burger King sitting at the crossroads like a fish out of water, the only sign of the white man’s world between Flagstaff and Tuba City.

A few miles up the Desert View Road, just past the Little Colorado Overlook, was the dirt two-tracker leading out to Cape Solitude, the proposed location of the Grand Canyon Esplanade. Mary reached her study area from the east side of the Little Colorado Gorge, so she continued on Highway 89.

Troubling memories of the Navajo Tribal Council meeting a few days before danced in her head. But she pushed them aside. Mary was a scientist, not a politician. In the end, the Navajo were going to do what they thought was in their best self-interest. She had done her job. She had given them the simple truth. The Grand Canyon Esplanade could not be good for the survival of the native humpback chub. Either the Navajo would vote against the project and protect the fish, or they wouldn’t, and she would catalog the chub’s demise. There was nothing to be gained by worrying about it. So just push on.

A few minutes later she came to Cameron, sitting on the west bank of the Little Colorado River, with the silver Tanner Suspension Bridge, dating back to 1911, spanning the shallow blue river. 

At this time of year, the Little Colorado was wide but no more than a few inches deep. In a few weeks, the summer monsoons would roll in and the Little C would explode with superpowers.

Cameron was the largest town around until you got to Page or Tuba City. It was home to about 1,000 hearty souls, mostly Navajo, and some memorable history. The town had started as the Little Colorado Trading Post in 1913, the only settlement of any kind for hundreds of miles, when brothers Hubert and C.D. Richardson set up shop. They later changed the name to honor their old buddy Arizona Senator Ralph Cameron. The trading post was always busy with tourists scoping out the genuine Indian jewelry and blankets while they snapped a few pictures of the handsome silver bridge, which resembled an erector set construction, spanning the shimmering Little Colorado River. Mary usually stopped there after a hard day’s work for the best Navajo tacos in the whole wide world.

Sitting next to the trading post was the Grand Canyon Hotel, built in 1928. It had nothing to do with the Grand Canyon, but it had a catchy name that often caught the eye of the passing motorists. There was also the Cameron Post Office, built in 1916. 

The strangest attraction in Cameron was the Navajo Swtloghome, a 1,800-square-foot log cabin, a cross between a hogan and a modern cinder block house. It was the architectural equivalent of a jackalope.

Mary cruised slowly over the bridge, noting that the Little Colorado flow was almost as low as she had ever seen it. The humpback chub would appreciate the coming rains but not the mud and silt the Little Colorado in flood stage delivered on its way to the Colorado River. 

The mud flow was almost too big to put in perspective. About thirty miles south of Cameron, on the upper stretches of the Little Colorado, there was an amazing spectacle of nature called Grand Falls. Its nickname was Chocolate Falls because of its color when it really got cranking. At a height of 185 feet, Grand Falls was taller than Niagara Falls. After a hard rain or snow melt in the Painted Desert upstream, Grand Falls became an almighty wonder of nature. It roared and thundered for miles around. But most folks had never heard of it because it was inaccessible by road. The Navajo didn’t want a lot of belegana roaming hither and yon. Mary had hiked in on several occasions to witness its majesty and to see what she was up against, trying to protect the fragile humpback chub. It made her heart race just thinking about it.

 Just outside Cameron, Mary took a dirt path that was more trail than a road. After many years of trailblazing in her trusty four-wheel-drive pickup, she had transformed it into a passable route. The twisting path led to the spot where Moenkopi Wash drained into the Little Colorado. There were a few Navajo families living in hogans in the area, grazing sheep, growing beans, Hopi short-eared corn, and squash; and tirelessly hauling water. It wasn’t an easy life.

Mary had been given written permission years ago by the Navajo government to go wherever she liked in the course of her studies. She had made it a point to introduce herself to all of the locals and explain the purpose of her presence on their lands. The Navajo were gracious and welcomed her help in saving the fish that most had never seen.

Mary parked her truck at the rim above Moenkopi Wash and grabbed her pack. She was traveling light today, wearing tan cargo shorts, a green tank top, Keen hiking boots, and a floppy sun hat and carrying maybe twenty-five pounds: lunch, a gallon of water, a few notebooks, her iPad, a spare battery, her cellphone and emergency satellite phone, sunscreen, and assorted odds and ends. She swung back her blond ponytail and hoisted the pack onto her strong shoulders. After years of working in the backcountry, lugging heavy loads, she was a coiled spring. Her skin was a dark brown from working in the blazing Arizona sun. There was a bounce to her step and a smile on her face. And as she descended the gravel sheep trail into the canyon, she howled like a coyote. She had the best job in the world.

She ate up the short hike to the canyon bottom where large cottonwood trees, salt cedar, and horsetail grass lined the dry wash. Ironically, Moenkopi meant flowing waters in Hopi, but the waters didn’t flow like they used to. 

When Mary began her research, Moenkopi Wash ran all year round. Now, the wash dried up in late April or early May. The local Navajo farmers could no longer irrigate their crops year-round. That said, in a flash flood, Moenkopi Wash sported a few Class Three rapids.

When Mary reached the sandy wash, she stopped to admire the blowing snow. Cottonwood seeds flew in the light breeze, resembling light snow flurries, and the sun reflected off the white, cottony fuzz balls. Mary had once read that a single cottonwood tree could release twenty-five million seeds. As she watched mesmerized in a grove of gray bark cottonwoods in the depths of the oven-like canyon on a hot summer day, it really looked like she was standing in a snowstorm.

As Mary made her way down the canyon toward the junction with the Little Colorado River, she thought about her work. There were just so many variables.

She had spent her first year establishing the baseline conditions—turbidity, water quality, and seasonal temperatures. The humpback chub wasn’t the only resident fish in trouble. The tiny spine dace, a speckled silver and yellow fish resembling a sardine, was also teetering on the brink of extinction.

Her studies had taken her to the headwaters to the south and the Colorado River to the north, and along the way she had found threat after threat. 

She had caught predatory green sunfish in some of the side tributaries like Bear Canyon and East Clear Creek. A few months before, she had netted two largemouth bass in Miller Canyon. That spelled big trouble; those non-native predator fish would need to be removed if the native species were to survive.

The biggest problem was poor water quality, a direct result of the endless stream of cattle and sheep shit draining into the river from small ranches in every direction after a rain. And the Navajo were not going to stop grazing their livestock, for they depended on the beasts for survival.

The Southwest megadrought was another huge factor. It decreased the river flow, which carried a double bang, making it too shallow for the chub to spawn and too hot for them to live.

Then there were the unknowns, like hazardous materials. Mary had documented that PCBs from who knew where had induced alien mutations in the fish.

Ultimately, Mary was trying to figure out one thing: How many fish did there need to be in the Little Colorado River for the species to survive?

To accomplish her mission, Mary needed a lot of equipment. And it all had to be hauled in by foot or sling-loaded by helicopter.

She had established her base camp at the confluence of Moenkopi Wash and the Little Colorado in a small grove of cottonwoods on a rocky ledge above the river and out of harm’s way when the river was at flood stage. It was essentially her office and storage area for all the tools of the fish-monitoring trade.

There were tables and large Igloo coolers, storage cabinets, toolboxes, cables and ropes, tarps, chairs, dip nets, buckets and screens, water pumps, wire mesh cages, metal aquarium boxes for the storage and analysis of fish, and boxes of PIT tags used to follow the fish on their migrations up and down the river. Then there was the bulky, technical stuff: a battery-powered freezer, solar antennas and receivers for GPS tracking, radio transmitters and SAT phones, electrofishing wands, and in-stream cages. All in all, Mary had a state-of-the-art biology lab worth hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting at the bottom of one of the most isolated canyons in the country. Every time she rounded the last bend in Moenkopi Wash and saw her outdoor office on its shady sandstone perch above the Little Colorado River, her heart sang.

But not this time. When she arrived at the confluence and looked across the Little Colorado, she stopped dead in her tracks and let out an inadvertent scream. Her office was gone; annihilated might be a more accurate description. Everything had been smashed and flung into the river. It looked like it had been hit by a tornado.

Mary ran toward the catastrophe with a panic she had never known before. 

When she left the site that past Friday, everything was in order. And three days later, her world had been destroyed.

How could this happen?  Her study area was too far from the Colorado River for anyone to find it, and few hikers ventured into such a wild and uncharted place. There were no roads nearby. No one lived within miles, other than a few Navajo families who were her friends. For Indians, the Little Colorado was a sacred place of big magic, so they always steered clear. In the five years Mary had been studying the river, there had never even been a single act of vandalism. She had never seen anyone in the canyon other than a few Navajo looking for stray sheep. No, the Navajos respected both Mary and her work. They would never have done this.

Who then?