270° panorama from "The Point" — Photo © 2007 Gary Varner — click here for a large version
270° panorama from "The Point" — Photo © 2007 Gary Varner — click here for a large version
"The Point"
by Gary Varner
I call it simply, "the Point" — like the mantra I learned for Transcendental Meditation in the 70's, I don't even tell close friends its real name. I've been going there for over 10 years [almost 20 now] to recharge my spiritual batteries. I love the place, but I've only taken another person there once, because isolation and solitude are essential to my experience of it. Over the years, I've camped as many as eight consecutive nights on the Point, sweating under a tarp by day, peering at dusk into one of the finest views of the Grand Canyon available anywhere, and singing into an unfathomable stellar vault until midnight, while almost never seeing another person.
The Point is so remote that at night the only artificial light visible is the dim glow of Las Vegas 130 miles over the western horizon. To get to the Point, you have to drive at least 50 miles off pavement, on several dirt roads and a four wheel drive path, and until now [January 2000] you could only reliably find your way there using special maps or directions from someone who'd been. But all that's bound to change.
On January 11 [2000], President Clinton created Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument out of over 1500 square miles of land in the Arizona Strip, the part of Arizona isolated from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon. The new monument encompasses about a third of the western portion of the Strip, which includes desolate stands of Joshua Trees on arid plains, forested mountains, and breathtaking cliffs along the western end of the Grand Canyon's north rim.
For me, the Arizona Strip has sentimental value, because away from the canyon rim, it reminds me of the part of Southern California I came of age in and where I learned to love camping: the arid Antelope Valley and adjacent [San Gabriel] Mountains. But it was also easy to lose oneself in the Strip. Not a single paved road now reaches the newly designated national monument, and there are no services available away from the two paved roads that clip the northeastern and northwestern corners of the Strip. Apart from a rag-tag assortment of dusty ranchers, only a few thousand people visited the area each year until now. It was basically a well-kept secret — an area upwards of three million acres without a paved road, gas station, or store. Over the years, I spent countless weeks wandering the area in my truck, sometimes utterly lost. Following unnumbered roads with a topo map, I would camp for a day in the forested highlands, then move to rock formations and juniper flats, and inevitably, of course, stand on the edge of carved eons, staring into the majestic Grand Canyon, on the Point.
So I literally cried when I heard that Clinton had designated the western third of the Strip a national monument. I agree that it deserves protection, but by next summer, Rand McNally will have marked the area in green on their highway maps, and then, drawn by that detail where there was only blank space on older highway maps, tourists headed for Southern Utah will steer out of their way to stamp another national monument on their Park Service passports.
So why couldn't the Federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which already administers most of the Arizona Strip, have just changed some of its policies? Why did the President have to go and tell everyone that the Arizona Strip is such a great place?
The cynical answer would be that a more low-key approach would not have warranted a press conference at the Grand Canyon during a presidential campaign, and it's hard to believe that Clinton knows the area, let alone cherishes it. He visited the Strip only long enough to sign the declaration at a desk that had been hauled into Toroweap Valley for the photo op, and the New York Times reported that while ferried by helicopter from the Strip to the South Rim of the Canyon for a press conference, "Mr. Clinton was at times nonchalant, flipping through paperwork as majestic vistas swept by the window."
A less cynical, as well as more thorough analysis would also note that reducing cattle grazing on the Strip would have been politically unfeasible without monument designation. Although there is little private land in the Strip, almost every acre outside of Grand Canyon National Park and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area is grazed by ranchers with BLM permits, and the impact is dramatic. The area is speckled with large, muddy "tanks" at which cattle congregate to drink, and one of the reasons it's so easy to get lost in the Strip is that the area is criss-crossed with unmarked two-track ranch roads. So while it's easy to escape people on the Strip, it's impossible to escape the cattle and dodge all the cowpies.
But I find it hard to care about the politics and the strategy in this case. For I valued the solitude more than I hated the cattle, and the attention monument designation will bring means that it may already be too late for me to wander, lost and alone — but blessedly unconcerned — in the Arizona Strip. And although the Point is not in the newly created national monument, I fear that with increased visitation to the Strip, Rand McNally will soon mark my cherished spiritual retreat a bright red "point of interest." Then road signs will show people the way, the BLM will "improve" the narrow, twisting four-wheel-drive part of the road, and I will never again stand, singing to the vaulted heavens, in splendid isolation, on the Point.
