One Best Hike: Grand Canyon. Elizabeth Wenk
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trails, but many prospects and a few larger mines exist within the park, including the prominent Orphan Mine, a copper and then uranium mine that can be viewed at Powell Point, as well as a large copper vein along the Grandview Trail. A few small mine shafts exist along the Bright Angel Trail, both near the top of Devils Corkscrew and partway down Pipe Creek.
MAJOR JOHN WESLEY POWELL
Because of his two pioneering descents down the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871, John Wesley Powell’s name is synonymous with the Grand Canyon region. When he boarded the Emma Dean, a boat he had named after his wife, he was not new to river exploration. Already in 1856, at age 22, he had rowed a length of the Mississippi River, followed by the Ohio River the next year.
Powell grew up in the Midwest on a succession of farms, as his parents moved about. His strong interest in natural history emerged in 1857 while taking a botany course at Oberlin College in Ohio. In subsequent years he made extensive botanical and zoological collections across the Midwest, before changing his focus to geology. With the onset of the Civil War, he enrolled immediately in the Union Army and had risen to the rank of captain when he lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh. After the Civil War he accepted a geology professorship at Wesleyan University. He was recognized as being an outstanding scientist—in particular one who had high standards and was very resourceful and endlessly inquisitive. This position allowed him to spend the summer of 1867 making scientific collections in what is now Colorado. In 1869 he returned west with the goal of exploring the virtually unmapped Green and Colorado rivers.
On May 24, 1869, his party of ten men departed Green River, Wyoming (not Green River, Utah), with ten months of provisions; six men exited at the mouth of the Colorado River, near the confluence with the Virgin River more than three months later. They were nearly out of supplies, because of losses each time boats capsized. (One man left just days into the expedition, unnerved by the adventure. The other three exited the Grand Canyon near Separation Rapid, just two days before the end of the canyon and were likely killed by either Indians or Mormons as they made their way back to civilization.)
With the knowledge gained on this first expedition, he returned in 1871 with a new crew. Less drama pervaded this descent of the Colorado River, allowing important natural history collections to be made and much geologic information to be recorded.
The well-known Powell continued to make important scientific and “societal” contributions in the western U.S. He was involved in the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey, established to administer surveys like those he carried out in the Grand Canyon, and served as its second director from 1881 to 1894. He advocated against dividing the southwestern U.S. into the standard 160-acre homesteads, realizing that this approach was inappropriate for the region; much larger blocks of lands and boundaries along water divides were required. He realized as well that water was a limited resource that must be shared downstream. Also, unlike many others in this era, he greatly respected for the Native American tribes in the Southwest, studying their cultures and languages and petitioning the U.S. government to care better for them.
Tour guides and tourists soon displaced most of the miners. John Hance was the first true settler on the South Rim, arriving in 1883. A drifter drawn to the Grand Canyon’s possible mineral riches, he quickly realized mining was not an efficient way to earn money and began guiding tourists to the Colorado River the following year. In subsequent years, the tourism business expanded rapidly, as more and more prospectors arrived on the South Rim and many realized that tourism was a more reliable source of income.
Among the miner-turned-tour-guides are Ralph Cameron, his brother Niles Cameron, and partner Pete Berry. In 1890 they obtained a mining claim at Indian Garden from the previous claimants. They quickly expanded the Havasupai route along the Bright Angel Fault into a trail, the predecessor of the contemporary Bright Angel Trail, and charged tourists a dollar to descend the trail. They soon constructed a tent camp at Indian Garden and Cameron’s hotel on the rim followed in 1903. (See section on trail history and construction, for more information.)
The tourism business required more than tour guides, and many settlers found profitable niches. Among them, Ellsworth Kolb and his brother Emery began a South Rim photography business in 1902, building a studio, today’s Kolb Studio, near the start of the Bright Angel Trail. They photographed parties descending the trail and then rushed to Indian Garden—the closest source of freshwater—to develop the photographs so that people could purchase prints on their return later than day.
Tourism was helped along by the fact that the Santa Fe Railway had completed tracks across northern Arizona in 1883, stopping in Williams just 65 miles from the South Rim and thereby providing relatively easy access for visitors from across the U.S. Before long, plans were in progress to build a spur line to the South Rim. William O’Neill, an early South Rim entrepreneur, organized funding and began to construct the route in 1897, laying tracks due south to meet the Santa Fe Railway’s tracks in Williams. Following his death in 1898, the Santa Fe Railway purchased the tracks and constructed the last 10 miles of track to the canyon. Opened in 1901, it ferried visitors in comfort—especially once the railway company and concession partner, the Fred Harvey Company, constructed elegant hotels and restaurants on the canyon rim. The construction of the new road to the South Rim during the 1920s triggered the demise of the train service, and the railway ceased to run in 1968. In 1989, the historical route was resurrected and the historical depot in Williams refurbished.
PHANTOM RANCH
Phantom Ranch is a collection of backcountry cabins, bunkhouses, and a dining hall located approximately one mile north of the mouth of Bright Angel Creek—a third of a mile upstream of the Bright Angel Creek Campground. The current structures were built beginning in 1922, designed by Mary Colter under contract with the Fred Harvey Company. She initially designed five buildings, but the resort was so popular that they built more structures. By 1930 the ranch appeared much as it does today. Only the hiker dorms were added much later.
The first structures at this location predate this. In 1903, Edwin “Dee” Woolley, a rancher from Kanab, Utah, and colleagues formed the Grand Canyon Transportation Company with the intent of building a cable across the Colorado River and a trail up to the North Rim via Bright Angel Creek, to be called the Grand Canyon Toll Road. They viewed a South Rim to North Rim trail system as the easiest way to increase tourism on the North Rim; to the north, the rail line stopped in Marysvale, approximately 200 miles north of the North Rim. They decided upon Bright Angel Creek as the best corridor, for François Matthes, a surveyor and geologist, had already created a rudimentary trail in 1903. They viewed the lower reaches of Bright Angel Creek as a good place for a guesthouse.
Only slight progress was made until 1906 when David Rust, Woolley’s son-in-law and a schoolteacher, took on the job of trail foreman. His journal indicates that the construction of the trail proceeded much as expected, but the construction of the cable involved much effort and numerous false starts. The first party finally crossed the Colorado River on September 20, 1907. In 1906, Rust and his crew also built the first dwellings at the Phantom Ranch site. They planted a garden, a small orchard, and many hundreds of cottonwood cuttings, obtained upstream from Phantom Creek, for shade. In subsequent summers they upgraded the accommodations and planted more trees in anticipation of a stream of wealthy guests. Unfortunately, relatively few tourists made use of this cross-canyon corridor, and although Rust continued to spend each summer until 1915 running his cable car and the Rust Camp, it never earned money for the Grand Canyon Transportation Company. In 1919 the newly founded national park took over possession of his cable car and trail.
MARY COLTER
Mary Colter’s name is inexorably linked with Grand Canyon architecture. She was first hired by the Fred Harvey Company to decorate Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque in 1901. She began her work on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1905, designing Hopi House. In subsequent years she designed Lookout Studio (1914), Hermit’s Rest (1914), the Watchtower at Desert View (1932), Bright Angel Lodge (1935), and most relevant for a Grand Canyon hiker, Phantom Ranch in 1922. She designed her buildings to be in harmony with the natural