Only a handful of people has been in it since a Powell survey party quit the Colorado River at Kanab Canyon in 1872. The gold rush may have brought a few prospectors into it before that. U. S. survey maps on the larger scale are not even available for its lower end. Kanab fills its many roles unknown, unspoiled, unvisited.

Kanab is a great gorge, winding down from Utah to meet Grand Canyon. It is a drainboard for the Plateau provinces and Kaibab Forest. It is a faucet pouring steadily into the Colorado River. It is an escape route for boaters shooting the rapids of Grand Canyon. It has been a lure for prospectors and a home for pro-historic people. It is a range for cattle. It was a world of beauty for three hikers who explored it in the Spring.

The three were mv husband Melvin and I, of Chicago, and our very good friend Kent Frost, of Monticello, Utah. Exploring Kanab was a dream of Kent's for seventeen years, since he stopped at its mouth in 1947 as boatman for a Norm Neville trip. We were ready for our longest hike together. Mel and I had prepared, as always, by wearing our packs at home. Kent had prepared by studying maps.

It was a sunnv April morning as we jeeped into the town of Kanab, Utah, searching for Preston Swapp. We needed information. Our plan was to enter Kanab Canyon thirtv-five miles up at the start or its deep section, go all the way to the Colorado and hike upriver in Grand Canyon. But we didn't know where we could enter, and a Forest Service letter in our pockets warned us we would be stopped somewhere bv a thousand-foot rock Jump. Pres Swapp and Bob Riggs are stockmen with grazing rights in the canyon. But, even cowbovs who graze their herds in the bottom prefer losing stock to trailing to the Big River after it. They have never been all the way down to Kanab's mouth.

Unsaddling his horse, Ladv Gay, who takes him into Kanab Canyon, Pros told us he thought from hearsay we could get through to the river. He and Riggs invited us to enter bv the trail thev have carved in Hacks, a side canyon.

So, a few hours later, with 28 pound loads on the men's backs (twenty-two for me) we waved goodbye to the Jeep and dipped over Hacks' rim, out of the world with people in it. The path down Hacks was a miniature Kaibab Trail, switching down the face of white limestone formations for an hour and a half and putting us in the middle of a wide and waterless valley.

Six miles from there. Hacks joins Kanab Canyon in a triumphant arena of redstone walls crowned with gargoyles. We made a dry camp near their Juncture that night, passing a dead bobcat on the way, and didn't come to water until the middle of the next morning. Just as Pros had advised. The few stalks of celery and carrots we carried were our only moisture until then, but it was unimportant. We were already absorbed in the isolated wonders of what was to be our home for fourteen days of continuous walking. 

On our hikes, we have found that canyons have moods. Kanab has two. Its first section is dry, wide, calm, full of cows. (Pres³ cows are handsome and show⁷ the attention he has lavished on them.) The lower end is exciting. Its rushing creek and deep chasms constantly made us step up our pace to see what was around the corner. The upper valley was frequently six hundred feet wide with walls three hundred to five hundred feet high. The lower end closed down to forty feet in places, with walls over a thousand feet above us — so narrow and winding that sometimes the only way to look was up. It is unusual to find a canyon in the Grand Canyon area with high sheer walls so close together.

The second day, Kent predicted the canyon would soon narrow because of the steep floor drop and hard formation. It did, bringing other great changes with it. Now continuously boulder-choked, the going was rough, with lots of hard climbing up and down over huge rocks, around deep pools. Even at wider places, there was usually only one, slim, complicated way to get through. We had to cross and re-cross the creek. You could hear the squish, squish of our wet feet. If we didn’t go a long way in a day, we certainly put in a lot of steps.

The first warning we ever had from Kent on falling rocks came here. He said there was more evidence of them in Kanab than any other canyon he had hiked. An expert's warning? "A rock can hit only in one place. Watch its direction, then step aside or run to the wall/⁵

The colors also began to change. The dark red walls of the upper stretches gave way to orange shaded with brown. Late the third afternoon, we entered the land of pink. Imagine an elephant's wrinkled hide in pure, shell pink. . . dusted with soft grey. Seeping water has blackened the wall foundations and planted a horizontal band of verdant green between the pink and black. At times, an entire wall is encrusted with travertine — that patiently accumulated excrescence of dripping water. Bas reliefs of stalactites showed through maiden-hair fern and wild orchids. Undercutting has made delightful caves at floor level. One such cave has a suspended green garden on its ceiling, water dripping from its plants like gentle rain.

But the sculptural glory of it all is a travertine waterfall. Arching out from the wall in the very course the water itself must have taken, you can picture one drop of water at a time being replaced with one drop of travertine, until the action was frozen in midair.

Add to this some of the most unusual rim outlines provided by any canyon. Kanab's rims are sharply eroded and full of peaks, like sand-drip castles. This creates exciting skylines wherever you look and reveals glimpses of distant pink walls . . . always promising more beauty around the next bend.

Kanab has many side canyons. They take the plodding out of hiking. Any we had to pass on the way down we promised ourselves we would investigate on the way back. This turned out to be a fine plan, as we saved several glorious surprises for the return trip. Many are not named on any map, but the local names have been used a long time.

Jump-Up Canyon is a long one with a theatre-sized cave near its entrance. Its Indian name describes the rock jumps at its head, making it impossible to get out there. Past Jump-Up, the rock floors are cemented so solidly by Kanab Creek it is impossible to budge even the tiny stones. If you wanted to lay a cement road that solid here, you couldn't; the water would break it up. One small interesting side canyon had great slabs of conglomerate rock, the end product of the floor we were walking on -- given a few million years. On our main street, wherever soft spots could reveal them, we would see tracks of bobcat, coyote and mountain sheep.

Another little canyon had big jumbles of rock, little waterfalls, and, over some slickrock, a water chute that would make an exiting slide.

A narrow side canyon, with a big rockfall at its entrance, rewarded us with redbud trees in bloom and a pool so beautiful we called it The Fountain of Youth. We made sure we stopped again on the way back for a second drink of what ought to be magic water, if there is any in the world.

Chamberlain's Cove has an old prospector's camp near its entrance. A coffee pot and frying pan still rest on a rock ledge. The rats have eaten everything but a box of polished rice.

Scottish Pool or Dripping Springs stopped us mid^ way in its narrow path with big pools and steep boulders. Had the weather been warmer, we would have swum through. We enjoyed hearing af forward that Pres Swapp had once done just that.

"Let's start leaving caches along the way," said Kent, the second day. So, figuring penuriously, we dotted our highway with little bags of precious food, hanging high from sticks. How good each looked when the Great Pickup began, like coming home each time we arrived at one. We always eat heavily the first few days, then have to pull in our belts later. But, when we tried to cache other supplies to lighten our loads, all Mel could leave was one handkerchief and one pair of sox.

On our fourth day, there were signs we were coming to the Colorado River. Bigger fish were swimming upstream. The decline became much sharper. Then, three and a half days from Hacks, two carp and ten suckers later, we walked out on Kanab Beach in Grand Canyon!

Kanab has spewed out enough boulders into the Colorado from its rock-stuffed corridor to create one of the longest rapids of the Grand Canyon run with probably the biggest drop, an estimated thirty feet. There are two old camps at the mouth of Kanab. One, above the beach, had a sack-shaped pound of salt and some dynamite caps. The other, upriver a short distance, was elaborately set up long ago for two men.

Eating our first canyon fish for supper, lullabied to sleep by the freight train sound of Kanab Rapids, we all managed to wake up during the night to relish the remarkable amphitheatre view ... 360 degrees of jagged black skyline against a starlit sky, with the stars dripping down into all the notches.

To understand Kanab, it is right and proper to go on into the great canyon and see them in relation to each other. We lived in the bottom of Grand for seven days, first hiking all the way up to Tapeats Creek and back, then down to Olo Canyon and back.

Everything down there is hard. The water is rough. The land is rough. It takes a long time to get places. When we could, we rock-hopped along shore, because the big rocks were stable. When we took to the talus slopes, one leg seemed shorter than the other by the time we were through. Loose gravel, deep gullies and big, loose stones added to talus troubles, with constant gaining and losing of hundreds of feet in altitude. How glad we were that we had cached our sleeping bags at the mouth of Kanab and our loads were lighter.

This meant learning to sleep on the bare ground. We combined it with the thrill of getting down into the granite layer. Our first river camp was a granite cave in a bite-size, nameless canyon beyond Fishtail Rapids. Kent made us a heated mattress of hot coals underneath the cave's sand floor. But, by the time we camped next night in Surprise Valley at Deer Creek, we dispensed with all that work and just cuddled up to the fire. Kent found a rich ledge of copper in the bite-size canyon. Doesn't it seem like a good association to use the name of a man who was an expert Colorado River runner for nine years and who has walked the length of 85% of the canyons that empty into the Colorado and San Juan? We called it Kent's Canyon.

Sheer granite walls blocked our shore path between Deer Creek and Tapeats, but Kent spotted an ancient horse trail that took us out the back way of Surprise Valley. To reach it, we had to slash, beat and claw our way through a jungle of cactus, a thicket of cat's claw trees and dense patches of cane grass — climbing over huge dead cottonwood trees, one so big two people could walk abreast on it over the creek it bridged. Once up on the Tonto bench, we found we were doing what people a thousand years ago had done when they must have lived happily between those two well-watered neighboring canyons. Kent found an obsidian arrowhead, ancient camps and strange, round roasting pits. He identified the eerie sound of a coyote pack for us up there on the bench. We'll surely know it ourselves next time we hear it.

We crossed one valley featuring barrel cactus six feet tall. The next valley was full of century plants. Our faint old trail finally landed us on the regular hiker's path to Thunder Falls, where we camped in a cave right beside the upper Falls and let it rain, since it chose to. The Falls roar in two tones, but before that night was over a third and louder tone was added — that of a flash flood racing down Tapeats Creek a thousand feet below us.

Next morning we could see that, while it had merely rained on us, it had snowed on the Kaibab rim far above. It was grand to see the sun. I washed clothes, dishes, and myself at the Falls. Then we climbed up higher to watch the dancy water spring amazingly from solid rock.

As we studied the fate of individual drops of water in those powerful streams, foamy above, glassy below, we began to realize that a big place adds importance to tiny things. The world's smallest bird, the humming bird,

thrills you in the world's largest canyon. An ant lion and a silver toad are significant works of art there.

That was the day we started living off the land. Our return trip camp in Deer Creek featured this menu: baked barrel cactus; coal-roasted carp, (three, two pounds apiece); Brigham tea; watercress salad.

We have several original recipes now for cooking cactus and recommend barrel over cholla or beavertail. (The carp were caught on the Colorado beach beside Deer Creek Falls.) We have tried wild watercress in all the canyons and will say that the pointed leaf variety has the sharpest taste and Kanab's the tenderest flavor.

"Rosalie," said Kent one day on the way back, "what do you have in your pack to make it so heavy?" The list was pathetically simple. How could so little weigh so much ? An extra pair of socks and underpants, a sweater, a sleeping bag, a nylon blouse. I did have too much toothpaste and that's heavy. But I couldn't have done without my two-ounce packet of hair curlers. I was ready for a shampoo and set. That very day at noon, we lunched beside some good pools where I beauty-shopped to my feminine heart's content.

To our surprise, we made better time on the whole return trip without effort, even though we were steadily climbing in Kanab. How different it is when you're toughened up. Mel always says the time to start a hike is at the end of-one. That's when you're in condition for it. Also, Kanab no longer seemed so hard after the obstacle courses of the Grand. No river party knows the rocks there the way we do. They haven't felt every one of them under their feet. We discovered, too, that you have a different feeling from when you're boating through. You're a part of the river then and close to the boats. When you're hiking, the river is something that gets in your way.

Indian pictographs that we had missed before showed up clearly now. High above us were beautiful white paintings of people. One shelf had some simple ruins. Kanab is an Indian name meaning "willows." It is fifty to eighty years since this was a green valley. Overgrazing on the plateaus above caused floods that sliced through the bottom. The last such flood was within Pros Swapp's memory. The center channel is now two hundred feet wide in places. On a bank thirty feet above us, we saw a tree trunk chopped by an axe. Since it was washed down from the town of Kanab eighty miles away, it sets a pioneer date for this most recent erosion. Disappointment has not obliterated an old tale of a lode of gold. There is an abandoned machine up in Hacks for grinding quartz. Uranium hunters looked in here, too. What role will Kanab play in the future?

Tracks of two mountain sheep, ewe and lamb, preceded us up-canyon for two days, while we wished for a peek at them. Something must have frightened them ahead of us, as they turned back and came face to face with us! Wheeling, they clicked up a sharp talus slope beside us and disappeared on a small bench up there. We hadn't gone more than a couple of yards, when they came clicking down the same slope behind us and rounded the curve down-canyon, the baby right behind its mother all the way. Quick of foot and quick of mind, they are beautiful animals.

Looking into a crevice slit, we found a winding hall' way a few yards long leading to a deep, quiet pool with a tiny skylight far above for illumination. Crevice Pool, we found out, is a rain barrel, not a spring.

Our last campsite was Maxwell, another side canyon, perhaps the gem of them all. Small and dainty, it was fragrant with the licorice odor of cliff roses abloom all over it. Wide, shallow terraces of smooth rock held basins of water that dripped down from one to another. A brilliant sunset lit up a great peak of white Kaibab limestone twenty five hundred feet above, making it shine gold through a deep notch of Supai red. We certainly had all different sounds of water for camping — big waterfalls, little ones, rushing creeks, bubbling streams, the Colorado's rapids and calm water, and Maxwell's dripping ponds.

On our fourteenth day, we still found it so hard to leave that we headed up Kanab to see Grama Canyon, before turning back to Hacks and our exit. Knowing it would disturb us to carry a speck of food back to the jeep, we sat down at the foot of the trail to finish a bag of candy — all that was left of the oatmeal, powdered milk, sugar, tea, dates, cheese, jerky, dry soups, Jello, fruit and nuts we had started with two weeks before.