Cutting a Clear Path
Julian Smith
Chris Crisman Photography
Starting at 10,000-plus feet in the alpine forests of the Aquarius Plateau, the Escalante snakes southeast for 90 miles to join the Colorado River at Lake Powell. The river is ridiculously crooked—one section covers 14 miles overland but would actually measure 35 miles if straightened out—and carves its way through sheer-walled gorges of Mesozoic sandstone for much of its length.
Today the Escalante is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the West. It crosses the closest thing in the United States to Australia’s Outback: thousands of square miles of rocky desert, sheer gorges and sublime beauty—all with very few roads or people. The river’s 1.3 million-acre watershed spans two counties (Garfield and Kane) that together count only 12,000 residents in an area the size of New Hampshire. Many are farmers and ranchers, like their Mormon pioneer ancestors. The two largest towns in the watershed are Boulder (pop. 220) and Escalante (pop. 783). Boulder was the last town in the United States to receive its mail by mule train, which it did until 1935.
“There’s a lot of love for the landscape here,” says Linda Whitham, the Conservancy’s central canyonlands program manager. “People are really passionate about this watershed.”
It’s easy to see why. The drive along Highway 12, which stretches between the towns of Escalante and Boulder, may well be the most scenic, wild and spectacular 27 miles of road in the country. The view is an otherworldly landscape of petrified sand dunes and rocky ravines, a topographic map in raw stone, with a palette made up of every skin tone on Earth. At one point the road traverses the Hogback, a ridge barely wide enough for two lanes of asphalt, with sheer drops on both sides.
In this unforgiving landscape, the Escalante River provides habitat for more than 200 species of migratory birds, including the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher. Five species of native fish live in the river and its tributaries, and black bear, mountain lions and elk all pass through the watershed.
The Escalante faces many of the same challenges as other tributaries of the Colorado River. An invasion of non-native plants like Russian olive and tamarisk have clogged its banks and disrupted hydrologic cycles. More than a century of farming, ranching and other development has affected the river’s flow through pumping, dams and other diversions. Climate-change models predict the arid region—already parched by a decade-long drought—will experience even worse dry spells in coming decades. . . .
http://magazine.nature.org/features/cutting-a-clear-path.xml
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