“Location, location, location,” the mantra of realtors and vacation brochures goes. I say timing is equally crucial when looking at scenic lands. I knew the timing was right, because during a spring snowfall a few years back, the crew that’s supposed to clear our Flagstaff driveway got stuck and their truck had to be winched out by another. I’d checked the South Rim’s Yavapai Point webcam obsessively when that low-pressure system rolled in, and the canyon had vanished most days, shrouded by gray nothingness. The Park Service shut down Desert View Drive and the Hermit
Road, as they do if conditions warrant it. The Southwest’s aridity notwithstanding, heating unchecked now vaporizes more ocean water, which travels and precipitates, dumped at certain times and places counter-intuitively while others lie dry. I, for one, was not about to let such wealth go untapped.
At the Grand Canyon South Rim, after a quick snack and strapping on snowshoes, my wife and I crossed a burn area torched by 2013’s Halfway Fire. Skeletal trees stood at the great seam: crooked, ivory limbs encrusted with alligator-skin charcoal patches. The stark silhouettes told the story of piñon-juniper forest adapted to dryness, fire, and low temperatures. Two-needle piñon largely depends on snow, banked as soil moisture. A waxy cuticle sheathes the reduced leaves, shedding snowflakes and slowing transpiration. But the wax is highly flammable, and needles brown from drought are ready tinder.
A fellow canyon guide once told me about a flash flood shortly after the North Rim’s 2006 Warm Fire. Ashen slurry had rushed through a tentacled canyon, a geological squid spewing ink into the river. Veteran Grand Canyon river guides and Park Service river rangers can tell which upstream side canyon is being rained on and flushed by the shade of color the chameleon Colorado assumes.
Trees and their understory on the rims anchor topsoil, a sponge whose water trickles downward to feed weeping walls speckled with maidenhair fern and nodding columbines, or to pulse from Coconino and Supai sandstone or from Muav and Redwall limestone, thousands of feet below.
Perhaps the Hopi goddess Nuvak’chin Mana—in charge of cold weather and the white gift saturating the earth for next year’s crops—has been offended. Tramping toward Shoshone Point, roughly two miles from Yaki Point as the cumulus sails, I glimpsed the San Francisco Peaks, Nuvatukya’ovi, the “Place of the High Snows,” her home and that of fellow katsina elemental spirits.
The San Francisco Peaks are the heart of winter in Arizona, “an island of snow surrounded by desert,” in the words of one backcountry skier who has cut powder turns there. Perched on the margins of the Colorado Plateau, the range can be seen for nearly one hundred miles from any direction, and from the top, both rims of the Grand Canyon stand out against the western horizon. Six summits crowd around Mt. Humphreys (12,633 feet), the highest point in the state, clad with its only stretch of true tundra. The peak is a stratovolcano, like Japan’s Mount Fuji, steeper than shield volcanoes and estimated to have once reached nearly 16,000 feet. After winter storms, avalanches scour gullies and ravines. An underdressed runner died from exposure one May, with temperatures dipping to twenty-two degrees and winds of up to forty-five miles per hour. Summer is equally risky. Lightning killed a teenage hiker near the summit in an area struck over a hundred times in an hour. Within minutes, rain can corn into hail, bouncing off rocks crusted with lichens. It is no surprise that weather gods are thought to dwell on these heights.
Squirrel—Laqan—was one of them, visiting the mesas for the winter dances. These days, wastewater snow for a Flagstaff ski resort defiles the mountains’ hallowed flanks. Many Hopis condemn snowmaking itself as sacrilegious, since it interferes with the natural water cycle. The musician and painter Okhuwa P’ing (Ed Kabotie), a grandson of Fred Kabotie, who painted some of the Desert View Watchtower’s murals, sees such meddling as “shaking your fist at God.” Perhaps he was being more considerate of other people’s beliefs than they were of his. Snowmaking from the dregs of households and businesses to me seems more like flipping off God. Even more appropriately, other Hopis have compared it to “urinating on the altar at the Vatican,” and anthropologists to baptizing babies with dishwater. The effluent of the affluent includes runoff from mortuaries and hospitals, associated with death, disease, and spiritual contamination. The Grand Canyon’s Hualapai fear that it will seep into the ground and from there into a sacred spring below the Snowbowl. Indigenous Mountain Protectors praying and protesting at the resort have been insulted, attacked by snowboarders, and arrested. For these tableland dwellers, springs and their source are linked to the health of the world and all things living in it. Like certain shrines, ruins, trail cairns, and petroglyphs, ceremonial springs are “footprints” that Hopi ancestors left behind on their wanderings to the center place. Spring water is “wild water,” in which benevolent water serpents dwell.
A katsina song that Emory Sekaquaptewa, the “Noah Webster of the Hopi nation,” recalled offers a mesa perspective:
They are preparing themselves,
Over there at the snow-capped mountains.
The clouds,
From there, they are putting on their endowments,
To come here.
Hopi women, children, and men, after death, become clouds.
Skiers as well, and backpackers and river runners, should understand the katsinas’ cargo, those blessings from the departed, as a divine endowment.
The peaks and Paayu, the Little Colorado River, from whose depths the wandering clans first proceeded, are a sublime dyad of water and land, pivotal poles to which traditional Hopis orient themselves. Desertification like that which currently rakes the Southwest has not been seen since their ancestors settled in this canyon 1200 years ago. Between 1930 and 2010 alone, snowfall across this sparsely peopled quarter lessened by two-thirds. Yet people, through songs, “Remember when the rains moved along from down below, drizzling all night long,” and “Everything on the sand altar would become bright with flowers.” The “sand altar”—need I say it—is the earth now being pissed on.
Members of the tribe continue to make pilgrimages to shrines nestled on those distant slopes, to pray and pay their respects and collect conifer boughs for the katsinas’ costumes, as well as healing herbs and ceremonial eaglets. They gather Douglas fir branches for plaza rituals; a frostlike, silver-gray coating on the needles augurs moisture, especially rain, whereas dull green portends drought.
