Farewell to Our Intrepid Guide and a Water in the West Reading List

/ / Published in Dispatches from the Road

Days 10 and 11, Sunday/Monday: U.S. 89 to Utah 20; Utah 20 to I-15; I-15 to Salt Lake City.

A sad farewell as Frank, our scout and chief raconteur for the last 10 days, heads home to Escalante, Utah, and Clay and Dennis continue north to visit the Great Salt Lake. This is the 11th dispatch in a series from Clay chronicling his recent journey with two compatriots following the Colorado River and neighboring region exploring the state of water, or the absence of it, in the West.

Clay, Frank and Dennis near Red Canyon, Utah. (Photo by Georgie Lister)

Our extraordinary guide Frank now needed to get back to Escalante. We could not have asked for a better scout. In sports terms, Dennis was the player-coach, I was the play-by-play announcer, and Frank was the color commentator. No matter where we stopped, if only to snap a quick photograph, Frank ran into someone he knew or who knew someone he knew. In Frank’s America, there are only one or two degrees of separation. Of the three of us, I am the most introverted, Dennis second, and Frank, well he is one of those rare people who can strike up a conversation with anyone. At Navajo Bridge, on the windiest day of our tour, Dennis and I were taking photographs on the old 1929 bridge, but Frank just walked up to a guy near the interpretive center who was studying something on the bridge. It turned out he was a condor expert and there was a young black condor resting on one of the girders. Thus, I had my first ever condor encounter thanks to Frank’s extroversion. I use the word “extroversion,” because it sounds clinical! Frank is a wealth of information, and he knows how to network with complete strangers. He’s a very talented mapmaker, and word on the street is that the restaurant he owns in Escalante with his wife Georgie, is outstanding. It’s true that we brought him along mostly for the cookies, but he turned out to be our canyon country leatherstocking. We grimaced or rolled our eyes almost every time he opened his mouth, but his stories always check out. Only once did we balk. He claimed that his father knew the British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and got to hold the skull of Lucy before her existence was revealed to the world. Somewhere in Africa. I was hoping that it was Frank who suggested the name Lucy, for a girl he fancied on an eighth grade field trip on Khyber Pass. 

We rendezvoused with Frank’s wife Georgie at a trading post near Red Canyon at the junction U.S. 89 and Utah 12. We lingered in the parking lot kicking up pebbles in an aw shucks farewell. We were sorry to see him go. Georgie brought another big Ziplock bag full of cookies. They had a big pickup. We had a big pickup. I felt like a kid finally getting to ride shotgun in the front seat. We gushed about Frank’s excellence for a hundred miles and then settled in on I-15 to get to Salt Lake before the snowstorm that was predicted. 

A Day off in Salt Lake City

Something we had planned for today didn’t materialize, so we had a comparatively free day in Salt Lake City. Naturally we sought out a bookstore and landed at the wonderful “new, used and rare” Weller Book Works in Trolley Square. And we had some good urban food. I did some writing. Dennis attended to business. I did laundry. I’ve had a lot of experience in life with coin laundries on three continents, and the ratio of good to miserable experiences runs about 1:25. This was an easy one. In a rare moment of clarity, I had packed back in Dakota a plastic bag full of quarters. In the bookstore I found only ten books I wanted to purchase, and then purchased only one. Dennis bought half a dozen, but he didn’t have to fly home at the end of the trip.

Further Reading on Water and the West

Speaking of bookstores, there are many excellent books on the West and, more particularly, Water in the West. At the risk of overlooking titles we should have included, a bibliography for our Colorado River Country trip is listed below. Many are classics, and most are terrific reads. If you only have time for one, pick up Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire. 

Erika Marie Bsumek. The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructure of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau.

Craig Childs. House or Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Continent.

Edward Dolnick. Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon.

Timothy Egan. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.

Michael Engelhard. Where the Rain Children Sleep: A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau.

Kevin Fedarko. The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon.

Heather Hansman. Down River: Into the Future of Water in the West. 

Norris Hundley, Jr. Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West.

Russell Martin. A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.

David Owen. Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River.

James Lawrence Powell. Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West.

John Wesley Powell. The Grand Canyon Expedition: Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons.

Marc Reisner. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.

Rob Schultheis. The Hidden West: Journey in the American Outback

Hampton Sides. Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West.

Wallace Stegner. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.

Donald Worster. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity & the Growth of the American West.

Water in the West — Routes and Itinerary

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