Picture This Beautiful Brown Over Your Fly Tying Bench. and Feel
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PENNSYLVANIA (continued) Orvis Philadelphia 1423 Walnut Street Picture This Beautiful Brown Over Philadelphia 19102 — 215-567-6207 Orvis Philadelphia 8605 Germantown Avenue Your Fly Tying Bench. And Feel Chestnut Hill 19118 — 215-242-9332 TENNESSEE Good All Over Again About The The Great Outdoors Shop 110 E. Mountcastle Drive Last One You Watched Swim Away. 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Box 9029 Jackson Hole 83001 — 307-733-5407 Trout Unlimited 800 Follin Lane S.E., Suite 250 ENGLAND Vienna, Virginia 22180 Orvis Shop in London's West End One poster @ $20 27 Sackville Street London, England WIX 1DA Three posters © $50 Telephone 01-494-2660 Postage & handling $ 2.00 Orvis U.K. 4.5% The Orvis Shop at Bridge House Virginia residents add sales tax High Street Total Amount Enclosed Stockbridge, Hants, England Andover 10264) 810-017 Name Street Address City State Zip LI Check CI MasterCard LI VISA 1:1 American Express Card Number Expiration Date Signature TRW T 19 A LEE'S FERRY T POWER, POLITICS AND TROUT ON THE COLORADO lUVER othing fully prepares you for your first Lee's Ferry angling experi- ence.N I was moved to poetry by the time our boat started upriver from the dock. As the morning sun began to top the walls of Glen Canyon with glowing, golden-red light, my inspiration turned to awe. Looking up the sheer, pastel rock IN...past the rim hundreds of feet above to the narrow window of turquoise sky, you realize you are suspended above the cobble by the cold, clear waters of the mighty Colorado, still carving the Grand Canyon even as you cast to its quiet pools of trout. A History Lesson t's easy to imagine the others who must have marveled at this mysti- I cal place as they floated down, first on clumsy log rafts, then in heavy wooden dories. John Wesley Powell in 1869 and Padres Dominguez and Esca- lante a hundred years earlier floated through what is now the Lee's Ferry fishery reach of the Colorado. Today they would recognize the ageless can- yon, but the river is changed forever. The Colorado begins life as the rain- drops and flakes of snow that fall and pack on the vast snowfields of the Never Summer range of the Rockies. The place at which it becomes flowing wa- ter may well be the Lake of the Clouds in Rocky Mountains National Park. But the first real stream it becomes has a more prosaic name, The Grand Ditch, and its waters are first taken here, long before it is anything like a river. That this singularly magnificent wa- tercourse, in existence since the Ceno- zoic Age, is able to escape the State of Colorado at all is a tribute to the huge area it drains (244,000 square miles), and the volume of water it carries. At least 22 major diversions are employed in the state, including the infamous California. The man-made changes the Lee's Ferry boat ramp. The Spanish Big Thompson Project. This phenom- river encounters on its way prevent this priests made the first entries in the ena of engineering and politics deliv- cycle's natural completion. The river chronicle of Lee's Ferry, but the most ers the river's waters out of the basin to will never again see a sea, dammed in- important contributors to the early his- where nature never intended: the arid stead into lakes and canals to be har- tory of the area were Major Powell and Eastern Slope flatlands, via the nine nessed and controlled, its water and a Mormon fugitive from justice. foot by 13 mile Adams Tunnel, bored power bought and sold. The bearded and haggard one- 2,400 feet beneath the Continental Di- Perhaps the changes started with the armed man who stepped ashore near vide. Mormons, the first white men to ma- the mouth of the Paria River on August What isn't siphoned off in Colorado nipulate the river. Helped by Major 4, 1869 was a professor of geology at continues through reclamation dams Powell, they built the first boat used to Illinois Wesleyan, floating the Green and diversions in Utah and Arizona, cross the river. Christened the Canyon and Colorado Rivers ostensibly to study trying to flow to its natural destina- Maid, the historic little scow opened the geology of the canyons. But Powell, tion, the Sea of Cortez, aka the Gulf of the Arizona Territory to settlement by a former Union officer, Civil War hero Mormon pioneers and missionaries. (he lost his right forearm at Shiloh) The river had been crossed but once and future father of the Bureau of Rec- The river will before, 100 years earlier, by the Domin- lamation was also determined to learn never again see guez-Escalante party. They had almost whether the Colorado was navigable all a sea, dammed drowned trying to cross at what is now the way to Mexico. Although he quit Instead into Lee's Ferry, and had to climb back out far short of his goal, his party were the lakes and canals of the canyon and walk many miles up- first white men through the Grand Can- to be harnessed stream to the only other ford. This yon. and controlled, "Crossing of the Fathers" — and the rest The party had left Green River, Wyo- its water and of Glen Canyon — is now on the bottom ming on May 24, 1869 in cumbersome power bought of a vast and unearthly lake. boats designed by Powell himself. Less and sold. The campsite the party used in the than ideal for their purpose, the dories fall of 1776, however, is still discernable did, for the most part, survive the des- just off the paved road to the present perate journey and delivered all but 22 TI-101 'I AUTUMN 1991 maiden voyage was to ferry Powell, Hamblin and eight Mormons south across the river into the Navajo country of Arizona. They secured a treaty of sorts with both the Navajo and Hopi nations in the interest of future Mor- mon settlement. Powell then boarded a stagecoach from Fort Defiance to travel east and organize this second expedition, which again began at Green River, Wyoming. Like others, Powell considered the Green the west fork of the Colorado. Again, he embarked in May, but this time the hunters, trappers, frontiers- men and adventurers were replaced by a crew of reasonably competent topog- raphers, geologists and photographers, as well as a cook and an artist. As in 1869, however, none of the team could claim any real skill as boatmen. The expedition moved slowly, and Powell left the party on several occasions to travel overland. He was not with them when they ended the first leg of the second trip at the Paria, having pulled out at the Crossing of the Fathers in Glen Canyon. Frederick Dellenbaugh climbed the canyon wall on the north side of the river and tried to hit the PHOTO: MICHAEL COLLIER cliffs across the river with his .44 three of the group to the end of the dangerous leg of the journey. But the Remington revolver. The shot rang out ordeal at the mouth of the Virgin River expedition survived. The Colorado was and was followed by 24 seconds of si- on 30 August. "conquered." And a year later, Powell lence before the reverberation returned On this first visit to Lee's Ferry, Powell was back at the confluence of the Colo- "like the rattle of musketry." Echo Cliffs stayed only overnight, probably camp- rado and Paria rivers, not boating the were named on the spot. They form a ing at the same spot the padres had water this time but planning his next, major panorama in the scenic topogra- used a century earlier. In his journal, more extensive exploration. phy of the region. he noted the name he gave to the mag- Powell had chosen the Paria as the The party came off the water at the nificent canyon through which they had point at which to be resupplied by pack Paria, cached the boats and supplies just floated.