Everyone is talking about the double rainbow that suddenly appeared over Hualapai Hilltop as the sun set over the Spaghetti Western horizon. In Native American lore, a rainbow is a bridge from one world to another. And that’s precisely the kind of journey we’re in for, those of us who have pulled into the parking lot for the night at the edge of this thousand-foot-high cliff, the terminus of Indian Road 18 on Arizona’s Havasupai Indian Reservation.
Hidden at the bottom of this hot, winding gorge, in a place gold-greedy Spanish conquistadors just couldn’t be bothered with, is the unlikeliest of unlikelies: Cataract Canyon. The Grand Canyon’s swimming hole. A ribbon of dramatic waterfalls unspooling one after the other amid Jurassic scenery that flies in the face of all reason.
The Havasupai (translation: people of the blue-green water) are the only continuously residing Native Americans in the Grand Canyon. Today, they are the sole proprietors of a secret Shangri-la reachable only by hike, horse or helicopter.
People speak of making as many as 900 calls to the persnickety tribal office to nail a campsite here when the checkered flag falls February 1 at 8 a.m. Mountain time. These are generally the die-hards who start down the switchbacks before dawn with headlamps and heavy packs. Youth groups and scout troops. Adventure junkies who spend a night in the back of a Camry so they can make tracks in the dawn’s early chill.
Then there are those who pay operators $1,000 just to handle it. To secure the elusive permits. To convoy the tents, meals and air mattresses (and sometimes even the clients themselves) to the bottom and back by mule train or helicopter. It seems like overkill until I realize the same hiking boots that did a yeoman-like job getting me to Everest base camp are leaving blisters on my toes after just an hour on those switchbacks. Combined with the ache of my under-appreciated muscles, this has me reconsidering that $170 chopper flight in and out.
The Havasupai have been living here since before Columbus, and people of one tribe or another had been living here since before Jesus. They believe the entire human race was born in the Grand Canyon after the god of good fashioned a canoe to save his daughter from a great flood started by the god of evil. She then found herself pregnant first by the sun and second by a waterfall in the sacred canyon.
I step off Switchback Hill into a flat gravel gulch where once a mighty river roared. Two hours to go, two liters of water left. There is nobody else in my sightline, which is how it’s going to be for much of this trip. And only when you experience that do you appreciate how rare it is these days.
Finally: the sign announcing “You’re almost there!!” with a smiley face that everyone complains is still half an hour from Supai. As if on cue, up pulls a mule train led by the town’s foremost smiley face: chatty, cowboy-hatted packer and night ranger David Bartholomew. Hikers who trade tips online say he’s the one friendly person in the village. He came as a tourist years ago and married a local woman. The natives still call him Mexican Dave to distinguish him from another non-member of the tribe known as White Dave.
At the base of fraternal-twin red-rock spires its people call the Watchers, the town of Supai is all tidy horse corrals and little houses. Each property has a horse, the family vehicle, grazing on its front lawn; though a handful of Polaris ATVs tool around town, delivered by chopper sling load. Most everything else arrives via U.S. mail, including my camping equipment. Supai is the only place in the country where mail still comes by mule train and goes out with a mule-train postmark.
Apart from trail maintenance and some chutes and ladders installed hither and yon to aid in the conquest of the falls, the tribe’s efforts playing nanny are minimal. At an informal depot behind a group evacuation point, a tribesman named Edmond lends out inner tubes and water shoes previously abandoned by feckless visitors.
A sign at Havasu Falls just outside the campgrounds explains that the water gets its hue from a high concentration of calcium carbonate, which is somehow not conducive to fish. Children are doing backflips off Havasu’s tiered rims into the boil. The falls are framed with dramatic travertine aprons, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
The campground’s other bookend is Mooney Falls, with a height exceeding that of Niagara. The descent via a complicated system of chains and caves is not for the faint of heart. In fact, the falls are named for a miner who attempted the same and was dashed to bits below. Mooney is the barrier to entry to Beaver Falls three miles downstream, where fewer than 10% of visitors wind up — though it’s the most prehistoric walk of all, one that requires fording the creek a few times.
The trail fades in and out, but there are landmarks: the enchanting fairy grotto with maidenhair ferns hung like wisteria. The valley of the vines, where the wild grapes haven’t yet ripened. The stairwell with barrel cacti shaped like Sissy Hankshaw’s hitchhiking thumb. The lone palm tree not native to the area signals the approach to Beaver, where a tiered spill has fooled some into turning around before they experience the very bottom, where one can soak all day in the oyster lips of several pools. The water generally comes up to the knees, but there are deeper points, too — and if you know where to find them, two secret green rooms and a blue room up under the falls.
It’s another four miles from Beaver to the Colorado River. Near what’s called Beaver Canyon is a place to spot bighorn sheep. They are said to make a rare appearance on the canyon floor when ancestors want to communicate an important message. Legend has it sheep wandered into Supai village just before the attacks on September 11, 2001.
But I don’t need a bighorn to tell me I’m out of time and will not be seeing the banks of the Colorado. Zipped into my tent by early evening, I’m ready to break camp at 5 the next morning, heading back on the outbound lane of the rainbow.
