Day 3: Mesquite, NV to Flagstaff, AZ
Arizona Strip, breccia, the Nevada Test Site, "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne", shades of red, the Great Kaibab Deer Drive, Bobbie Gentry of rivers
From Mesquite we take the I-15 North, across the border and into the Arizona Strip. The Arizona Strip is the name for that part of Arizona separated from the rest of the state by the Colorado River and its handiwork, the Grand Canyon. It is one of the more isolated, least populated portions of the lower forty-eight, and this patch of it, along the I-15, is particularly cut off: to even get to the rest of Arizona from here you have to first exit to another state.
The Strip is known for mining, particularly for copper and uranium, and the reason it is a good place to mine is because of something called a breccia pipe. To back up, the bedrock here is very soft, and given to being carved up into all kinds of shapes and situations by the wind and rain. Sometimes this even happens underground - water seeps down, finds a foothold, and erodes a pocket of empty space. A cave, in short, but not a fun cave, more of an airless bubble of utter darkness. Eventually the enormous weight of the earth above causes the cave’s ceiling to collapse, which then creates a new cave just above the old one. And so the cave burrows upwards in its consecutive incarnations over the millennia until it finally reaches a stratum sufficiently stable enough to halt its progress, leaving behind a vast, buried vertical pipe filled with breccia - with is simply Italian for rubble, broken up rock. This breccia is a perfect place for water to percolate through, leaving behind deposits of valuable minerals. Eventually erosion reveals the mouth of the pipe. Fragments of moss-green malachite and sky-blue azurite become visible, often washed into nearby streams, prospectors find them, and the rest is commerce and engineering.
We pass the only three towns along the I-95 in Arizona - Littlefield, Beaver Dam, and Scenic - cross the border into Utah, and arrive at St. George, a city of ninety-thousand people, home to the oldest active Mormon temple, and unfortunately directly downwind from a section of Nevada desert where the US government exploded over a hundred nuclear bombs, above ground, from 1951 to 1962 (they conducted many more subterranean tests).
The Nevada Test Site, so-called, was put where it was because the surrounding area was “sparsely” or “barely” inhabited. A few different factors were in play. Scientists understood radiation was harmful, but not how insidious that harm could be. The military was worried about being lapped by Soviet bomb-makers. Everyone put far too much confidence in science to predict the prevailing winds, and thus the direction in which fallout would drift. And politicians were concerned about public “panic,” and “overreaction” to the bomb blasts.
These combined to create dark comedy. The nuclear tests were framed by the government and press as a patriotic display; the test site even created jobs - being in favor of the tests was a form of boosterism. An article from The Guardian quotes a local columnist on seeing one of the blasts: “It was like a letter from home or the firm handshake of someone you admire and trust.’’
And you could see the blasts. People in nearby towns could physically feel the force of the explosions; some had their windows broken. Those not so favored could travel to Las Vegas on atomic tourism packages, to watch the test explosions from the rooftops of their hotels. A massive Hollywood production was even filmed near the test site, The Conqueror, with John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. Wayne later died of stomach cancer, leading to this perhaps apocryphal quote from a Department of Defense scientist: “Please, God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne.” (He was a heavy smoker, the issue is unclear).
But wind patterns, and the timing of some of the most powerful blasts, caused St. George to receive the worst of the fallout. Residents reported losing hair and fingernails. Thousands of sheep died near the city, covered in sores, their wool falling out. The government response was to double-down on reassurance. The Atomic Energy Commission produced a film on the testing program; one section was entitled “St. George, Utah: Fallout’s Nothing to Worry About!”. As for the sheep, they had died of malnutrition.
Eventually the insanity of the situation became untenable and the above ground tests, at least, were halted. The damage from the tests continued to perpetuate. A 1965 New York Times article reports on a team of medical researchers investigating thyroid abnormalities among St. George teenagers - one of them, sixteen, is quoted after his examination: “It doesn’t bother me. None of us think the fallout hurt. I don’t think much about it.” A 1984 study found cancer rates in St. George running at around sixty percent more than normal, and rates of leukemia running at around five times normal. Rates of thyroid cancer were also elevated. It all seems, again, insane ; but then the early 1950s is when the link between smoking and lung cancer gained wide acceptance among scientists, and the size of the cigarette market grew by about a hundred billion cigarettes between 1954 and 1960. In 1958 , for that matter, the Surgeon General doubled the amount of lead permitted per a gallon of gasoline.
(I don’t think this is a story about the 1950s, by the way. I think it’s a story about looking into the past.)
From St. George we bend back south to re-enter Arizona. On the way we pass the Red Cliffs. A bit later in the day we will pass the Vermilion Cliffs. Strangely there are no cliffs in America labeled scarlet or crimson, both of which I feel would have been reached for before vermilion; but maybe this is a sign of shifting usage? What makes these cliffs blush are iron oxides, specifically hematite - also the mineral that colors Mars the red planet.
From Colorado City (at one time the site of a massive and elaborate food stamp fraud scheme perpetrated by a fundamentalist Mormon sect) we take the AZ-389 East to Fredonia, and from there the US-89A South into the Kaibab Forest (Kaibab is the Paiute term for what English-speakers call the Grand Canyon; it translates as “mountain lying down”). We aren’t going that way, but the AZ-67 South, a two-lane blacktop, leads down through the forest to North Rim, a small settlement perched above the Grand Canyon, and in 1924 the site of a weird incident involving some deer.
What had happened was, in 1906 Theodore Roosevelt declared the area around North Rim a National Game Preserve. Specifically, he wanted the area’s mule deer preserved so that people could hunt them. Park Rangers responded by killing all of the animals that ate deer. Brad Dimock, writing for the Boatman’s Quarterly Review, records the results:
Over the next two decades, according to one count, they slaughtered some 4,899 coyotes, 781 mountain lions, 554 bobcats, and twenty wolves. At the same time, hunting of the native mule deer was prohibited. Thus the healthy herd of three thousand, that existed when Roosevelt founded the preserve, exploded. Meanwhile, sheep and cattle ranchers continued encroaching into the pine forests of the rim, reducing the range of the burgeoning deer herd. By 1924 there was virtually nothing edible within eight feet of the ground. The formally sleek, fat deer were reduced to staggering, starving zombies, and the Game Refuge had become an embarrassment to the country.
At this point a local operator named George McCormick stepped forward with a solution. What if you could somehow herd the deer down into the canyon, across the river, and then up onto the other side? Plenty for deer to eat south of the Grand Canyon! The Governor got behind the concept and offered McCormick $2.50 for each head of deer so relocated. Then Zane Grey, the famous author and nude photo enthusiast, got wind of the idea and decided that it would make for a good book; and also a good movie, so he arranged for D.W. Griffith to come out with a full film crew.
And so on December 6, 1924, there converged on the tiny settlement of North Rim approximately one-hundred Navajo and Paiute, equipped with cowbells to help them motivate the deer, fifty mounted cowboys, two of the most famous living Americans, a film crew, and a personal chef and tailor (for the use of Mr. Grey and Mr. Griffith). Despite the best efforts of all of these people, however, not a single deer was herded across the canyon. Grey explained the situation in an article for local paper The Coconino Sun:
The failure of the Grand Canyon deer drive might be laid to three causes - inadequate preparation, lack of enough drivers and the total unexpected refusal of the deer to herd.
Or, as the Sun editorialized: “It just can’t be done, and that’s all there is to it.” Zane Grey did however get his book. The Deer Stalker was published in 1925, and in its climax faithfully records the futility of ever trying to drive a herd of mule deer across the Grand Canyon.
In any case, we are again not headed in that direction. We continue on the 89A until we reach Marble Canyon, where we cross the Colorado River. The Colorado is something like the Bobbie Gentry of rivers - that is to say famous but maybe but not as famous as it should be. Your average person, asked to name rivers, would likely have to run through the Nile, Amazon, Mississippi, Yangtze, and maybe a handful more before coming to the Colorado. Yet the Colorado runs through some of the most beautiful scenery on earth. Complex, ancient civilizations grew along its banks. Forty-million people rely on it for water. It is slowly going dry as the cities, towns, and farms that depend on it syphon away more water than can be replenished. Lots of drama along the Colorado.
Once across the river we turn, following the US-89 South through the desert for a hundred and twenty-four miles until we reach the tree-lined streets of Flagstaff, Arizona.
Sources:
Jack Fuss and the Great Kaibab Deer Drive, by Brad Dimock
“Damned Stupid Old Guinea Pigs”: The Cover-up of the “Dirty” Harry Nuclear Test, by Katherine Good
Breccia Pipe Mining on the Arizona Strip and in the Grand Canyon, published by the National Park Service
Hollywood and the downwinders still grapple with nuclear fallout, by Rory Carroll
A Blast from the Past: Atomic Tourism in Las Vegas, by Bruce Rettig
Cancer Incidence in an Area of Radioactive Fallout Downwind From the Nevada Test Site, by Carl J. Johnson
Utah Town Calm on Fallout Peril, The New York Times
40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River. It’s Drying Up Fast, by Abrahm Lustgarten