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DAY 11 – Wednesday, March 24 (32 weeks pregnant)
START: Page, AZ
END: Ely, NV
MILEAGE: 455 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Glen Canyon Dam, Pahreah Ghost Town

For something powerful enough to have carved out the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River has a long history of flakiness.  Heavily dependant on Rocky Mountain snowmelt from as far north as Wyoming, the Colorado’s water level can rise and fall dramatically from one year to another, making it an unreliable source of water for more than a few thousand people.  When a river passes through mostly desert, that’s not exactly the vote of confidence a potential real estate buyer wants to hear.  The solution?  Build a dam.  Or more accurately, build several dams. 

Beginning in 1936, with the completion of Boulder (now Hoover) Dam in Nevada, the full might of the Colorado River and its tributaries has been harnessed and controlled by over twenty dams.  As a result, the river rarely makes it all the way to its former terminus in the Gulf of California.  There has been controversy of every kind of course.  Any time humans interfere with nature and flood an entire region, there are always plenty of people with something to say about it.  But nowhere along the Colorado has there been more outcry than at the Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona.

Glen Canyon, as well as the many side canyons that feed into it, used to be a veritable Eden full of hanging gardens, animals of every kind, and an untold number of Anasazi ruins and petroglyphs carved into the sometimes two-thousand-foot-high canyon walls.  It was these very same walls, made of strong durable sandstone, that led engineers to pick this particular spot to dam the river.  The rock was strong enough and the canyon narrow enough to support the high dam, and the surrounding basin was large enough to contain the lake that would eventually form behind it – effectively drowning the mostly untouched paradise.  Environmentalists fought hard, knowing this dam would be the death of Glen Canyon. 

They lost their fight.  Initial blasting and construction began in 1956.  In 1959, a bridge was built across the canyon, increasing the speed at which the dam could be built.  Before that, crews had to travel 200 miles to cross from one side of the canyon to the other.  Workers started pouring concrete in 1960 and continued dumping bucketful by 24-ton bucketful non-stop until 1963.  The dam was completed in 1966, at which point it took seventeen years for the Colorado River to slowly back up behind the giant wall, forming Lake Powell.  Today, all the beauty and splendor that used to be Glen Canyon lies in a grave four hundred feet below this 186-mile-long reservoir.   

Of course, this isn’t the way they tell the story at the dam’s visitor center.  They speak only of the solutions the dam has created: from a reliable water supply to a source of electricity and a boon for lake-centered tourism. 

I wanted to visit Glen Canyon, not for its dam, but for its bridge.  After seeing it on a website one day, I was sure this was the beautiful canyon-spanning bridge I’d seen in countless car commercials.  I wanted to walk out onto that bridge and stand over the middle of that canyon looking down.  Here now, Lauren and I looked out at the dam through several thoughtfully placed peepholes in the chain-link fence. 

It’s amazing how simultaneously repulsive and beautiful something can be.  At the time, we had no idea about Glen Canyon’s sordid history.  I only knew that in spite of its ominously flat gray appearance, the dam was truly a sight to behold; seven hundred and ten feet of solid concrete (taller than the St. Louis Arch) hard-fastened into the canyon walls, holding back who knew how many millions of gallons of water.  Underneath us, the river continued lazily on its way through the narrow canyon as though it had never encountered this unnatural barrier. 

Looking down it also occurred to me that, if one were so inclined, this would be a really cool place to commit suicide. 

The Glen Canyon Dam still continues to be a source of great controversy.  Regardless of the damage it has done to Glen Canyon, the dam, or more accurately, the lake that it created, is regarded as one of the biggest logistical goofs of the twentieth century.  Lake Powell is considered far too large a storage tank for the amount of water it actually provides to the surrounding areas.  According to the Glen Canyon Institute, it loses enough water to evaporation and bank seepage every year to supply the annual water needs of Los Angeles!  In addition, all the sediment brought in by the Colorado River is quickly collecting at the bottom of the reservoir.  Already, the dam’s power-generating abilities are a fraction of what they once were due to build-up near the turbines.  Within a hundred years, scientists predict sediment will be high enough to make the lake unsafe in the event of an earthquake or flood.  In seven hundred years, sediment will fill the lake completely. 

There have been a bevy of solutions proposed to deal with the ever-escalating problems surrounding Glen Canyon.  Many people have recommended decommissioning the dam and diverting the river around it, allowing the lake to gradually drain and eventually restoring Glen Canyon to its former glory.  Edward Abbey, in his book The Monkey Wrench Gang, suggests the more direct approach of driving a houseboat full of explosives to the base of the dam and setting it off.  Meanwhile, the Friends of Lake Powell assert that the lake and dam are just fine, and that changing anything would have more negative effects on tourism and the environment than positive. 

Before the dam was built, Glen Canyon was up for consideration as a national park.  Now the dam site itself has earned that dubious distinction.  Before we left, Lauren and I made sure to get our National Park passport stamped with the Glen Canyon seal, unaware at the time of the irony.

We continued west on U.S. 89 back into Utah to begin a part of the trip that I had been looking forward to for several years – the search for ghost towns.  This was the very essence of Backroad, America that I was seeking.  Middle of nowhere places that at one time were fully functional mining or railroad towns but that, for all intents and purposes, no longer existed except in history books and in the crumbling ruins they left behind. 

I had done a good deal of research ahead of time on websites like www.ghosttowns.com looking for likely candidates, places that would be worth the time and effort needed to explore them.  Your typical ghost town isn’t generally located right off the highway.  Most that I researched can only be accessed via dirt roads in varying stages of disrepair.  Since we were only driving a Mazda Protégé, I immediately ruled out any town that required four-wheel-drive access.  I also ruled out any town that didn’t appear to have a substantial number of ruins left.  No sense in going an hour out of our way just to look at half of an old water tank.

Pahreah, our first ghost town stop, had a double history.  The original town was settled somewhere between 1869-1872, depending on whose history you read, along the banks of the Pahreah River, and consisted of about forty families.  The river’s constant flooding forced everyone to abandon the settlement after only forty years, but the town was reborn in the 1930’s as a frequently used old west movie backdrop.  The flooding eventually forced even Hollywood to abandon the site and build a replica of the town two miles away in 1963 for the movie Sergeants 3 – starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.  Over the years, dozens of westerns have been shot in Old Pahreah and the newly constructed “town” of “Paria”.  According to the websites I was reading, the entire “Paria” set, as well as several structures in Old Pahreah were still standing.

About a mile from the movie set, the road narrowed, beginning a steep descent into a valley, and we couldn’t help but wonder what we’d do if we met a car coming the other way.  Pulling onto the shoulder was out of the question because well… there was no shoulder.  Instead, there was a sheer fifty-foot drop on either side, with not a guardrail in sight. At the back of my mind I was also wondering if the car would have enough power to make it back up this hill. 

All around us the landscape was alive with reds and pinks that outdid even the scenery in Monument Valley.  I got a little too preoccupied admiring it all and snapped out of my trance just in time to realize I had inched over to within three feet of the precipice.  

We parked in a big dirt lot with two or three other cars.  While Lauren made use of the outhouse, I walked up “Main Street” toward downtown “Paria”, shielding my eyes from the stinging windblown dust that had started kicking up.  I was amazed at how well preserved the buildings seemed to be.  I reasoned it must be the desert air with no humidity that keeps them from decaying.  Turns out, the buildings really weren’t that well preserved at all, but were in fact only five years old.  The chronic flooding that has plagued this area since the first settlement apparently took its toll on the Paria movie set as well, rendering most of the structures unstable.  The Kane County council didn’t want to lose out on one of its only tourist attractions, so they commissioned a team to dismantle and then rebuild the foundering “town.” 

I felt a little gypped, expecting to see relics from the past and instead getting a salesman’s pitch.  Still, we made the best of it.  After Lauren made her way up the street through a mini dust storm, we started snapping pictures.  She stood in the balcony, blowing down kisses like some old west hooker, and I played the part of John Wayne coming out the Saloon’s batwing doors.  Behind the saloon, a tall butte resembling the “chalk drawing” valley we’d seen the day before stood watch over the fake town. 

After we’d gotten our fill of the Old West (Hollywood-rebuilt-replica-style), we drove a little farther down the road toward Old Pahreah.  Unfortunately, the river was still rearing its ugly head and less than a quarter mile in, at a dip in the road, our way was blocked by moving water.  It was only a couple inches deep and a few feet wide, and I knew we probably could have made it across if I gunned it, but the warning on the sign we’d seen at the start of the road was ringing in my head.  The last thing we needed was for the car to get stuck in a bed of quicksand… or worse, loosen the dirt just enough to let the creek wash us into a ravine.  Old Pahreah was another mile or so down the road, and on any other trip, we probably would have grabbed some water, slapped on some sunblock and hiked in.  But Lord knew what kind of hills we’d have to climb over to get there and really the last thing we needed was to induce labor fifty miles from the nearest town. 

Instead, we drove back and walked around the Pahreah cemetery for a few minutes.  Each grave was made of a similar carved piece of sandstone.  Either the inscriptions had been erased after years of sand blasting, or they never existed to begin with.  Instead there was a solitary monument at the entrance listing the names of everybody buried there.  We noticed that an unseemly large percentage of the deceased had been children.  Here and there, flowers had been placed next to a headstone.  Apparently, descendents of the original Pahreah residents still lived in the area. 

We headed back up the narrow road to the highway without incident and continued west to our next ghost town, Johnson, another Old West movie set that had been used for the TV show Gunsmoke.  The directions to Johnson were even sketchier than the ones to Pahreah, which had only said, “Six miles off Route 89, about thirty miles east of Kanab.”  Our directions to Johnson consisted of a dot on a map, a half-inch north of Route 89, with no indication of which road you took to get there.  So when we saw a secondary road heading north with a sign pointing toward “Johnson Canyon” we took it.  I don’t know if we made a wrong turn there or what, but we never found the ghost town.  At one point, we saw a cluster of buildings that looked like they might resemble an old west movie set, but they appeared to be on private property, so we continued north.

The scenery continued to be amazing as we meandered our way toward Cedar City.  When the pavement ended and we drove for almost twenty miles on a dirt road, we just laughed and said, “This is what this road trip is all about.” 

Our goal for the night was to make it to Ely, Nevada.  From Cedar City, the most direct route was via a couple of state roads that cut right across the desert and mountains and met up with U.S. 50 in Nevada.  We got squeamish at the last minute at the thought of driving through potentially dangerous terrain at night on a small state road, so we decided to take I-15 up to U.S. 50 and then shoot west from there to Ely. 

It was 7:30 and already dark by the time we got to Route 50 and Ely was still another 178 miles away.  We debated finding a hotel near the interstate, but we were still trying to make up time from our day of car troubles.  We ate, gassed up and bought a Utah shotglass in Hinckley, the last official town for more than eighty miles, then pulled onto Route 50 and headed west. 

Like a lot of roads in this part of the country, Route 50 is difficult to drive at night, simply because the towns are spaced so far apart and there is zero visual stimulation for miles and miles at a time.  For the most part the road is completely straight, which sounds like it would be easy, but it eventually hypnotizes you to the point where you don’t realize when the road does start to bend.  Thank God for rumble strips. We turned off our music and opted for comedy tapes and recordings of “Friends” episodes to give my brain any stimulation we could to avoid spacing out and driving us off the road.

Around nine o’clock, we noticed a light in the distance.  We figured it must be a car, but there was only one light, not two.  It seemed too bright to be the single light of a motorcycle.  I thought maybe it was a train.  Perhaps there were tracks paralleling this road.  For five minutes we watched this light as it occasionally dimmed and brightened but never seemed to get any closer.  “What the hell is that?” we kept asking.  Was it a floodlight on a building?  Why wasn’t it getting any closer?  My imagination started running wild again and I pictured some ancient evil that had just awoken from its slumber and was drawing us, ever so slowly, into its deadlights.  After almost ten minutes, the light finally seemed to draw near and separate.  The two lights dimmed and suddenly we realized that it was, in fact, another car.  Thirty seconds later, the car blew past us and put on its high beams again. 

“Oh my god, how straight is this road?” I asked out loud.  We were doing almost eighty miles an hour and I could only assume that the other car had been doing the same.  We had been seeing his lights for about ten minutes.  Some quick algebra indicated that we had seen him from almost thirty miles away.  Yet, just like that, his taillights were already receding behind us. 

Just over the Nevada line we stopped at a solitary gas station to fill up and let Lauren pee.  After pumping, I went inside to wait for Lauren and saw that the bar/casino attached to the gas station was packed with people.  Music was blaring and people were drinking, smoking and laughing.  Apparently on this side of the middle of nowhere, this was the happening place.  I felt awkward just standing there, so I dropped a couple of quarters into a slot machine and when it ate them, poked around at the CD’s and tapes for sale, looking for a new comedy album. 

An hour later, we finally pulled into Ely (rhymes with “really”) and collapsed on our clean Motel 6 bed.  

ONTO DAY 12