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High Adventure Over The San Rafael Swell

By Chinle Miller

Canyonlands Field, Moab, Utah - It's the proverbial beautiful autumn day, with a sky so blue you'd forget there could ever be any other color if you looked up long enough. "A perfect day for flying," I say, stating the obvious. Lavar Wells nods his head, and I can see he's checking the instruments, so I turn my gaze back to that perfect blue. Last thing you want to do is distract the pilot when he's checking out the plane.

Lavar has a look about him that speaks competence, common sense, a look that, like crows feet, comes with doing - no theorizing here. He turns to me and nods, says, "Everything seems to work. Let's go flyin'."

"How many hours you have in the air, Lavar?" I ask.

"Oh, over 10,000 logged, but actually lots more than that. Soloed when I was 16. Pretty much all canyon flyin', landed in places most people don't even know exist."

I grin, "Let's go flyin'!"

Now the little Cessna 172 purrs as Lavar pulls out the throttle, bit by bit, slow and steady. We're off the ground quickly, way before the runway runs out, and it all has the feel of something that's been done 10,000 times before, smooth as vanilla pudding, something you could do in your sleep, pulling back the throttle like that, smooth, slow, and steady.

Now we're banking to the right, still smooth, flying over Bartlett Canyon, and now, quickly, we're over Tombstone Rock, then the junction of the Green and San Rafael rivers. "It's not called the San Ra-fay-el," an oldtimer once corrected me as we stood looking into the muddy waters of that quicksand-infested slow-moving river, "but San Ra-fel. Say it like that and they won't know you're from someplace else, you can leave 'em guessin'." Always good to keep folks guessin', I guess. In the hazy distance, the confluence of the mighty Green and Colorado rivers dwarfs this meeting of waters below us. Nearer, between here and there, lie the banded Orange Cliffs of the mysterious Maze.

"That's June's Bottom to the left over there on the Green River," Lavar says through the headphones, banking the little plane so I can see. "That's where my family weathered out the Great Depression, down in a little rock house by the river. They didn't get to town too often." He smiles with understatement as we study the tiny winding trail off a bank of cliffs down to the riverside, miles and miles wonderfully from nowhere. "The June was June Marsing, my uncle."

Lavar's been flying for some 45 years, and I'd stake my life that he knows the canyon country of eastern Utah like no other person on earth. He's the son of Bill Wells, one of the pioneers of canyon flying in southeast Utah, flying that's akin to Alaska's bush flying, flying where you'd dang well better know what you're doing or you won't be limping home to tell about it. Bill Wells is perhaps better known as the Flying Bishop of Hanksville, a canyon legend, and Lavar started flying with his dad when he was nine years old.

"Back when I was a kid," he muses, "there wasn't much by way of roads, and the only way you could get around, especially when it rained and got muddy, was to fly. Uranium mining was a big thing then, too, flew lots of miners around." Now Lavar works for Redtail Aviation out of Moab, with his wife, Susan, who keeps everything running smoothly, monitoring air traffic and scheduling flights while Lavar does what he loves more than anything in the world, showing people the canyons.

Way in the distance is our destination, the mirage-outline of the San Rafael Swell banked in its fortress by the jagged Reef. We're soon near the long knife-like face, and the sun strikes the huge monocline, turning the white Navajo sandstone buttery yellow. I turn in my seat to see the lofty La Sal Mountains holding the other end of this vast desert in place.

The little plane drones on, and we've now crested the surreal Reef and are flying southwest. I casually remark to Lavar that I've always wanted to see the Hidden Splendor Mine, another legend from the U-boom era. He doesn't say anything, and I'm not sure he hears me over the air noise, but he banks the plane towards a complex of spiderweb-like canyons. Now I see Muddy Creek below, barely a trickle, even with a recent rain. Lavar tells me his dad once did an emergency landing right there, in the creek.

Back in the 50s, everybody had their hopes tied up in doghole uranium mines in the Swell, up Muddy Creek and at Temple Mountain. My friend Harold Babcock repaired their scintillators over in Grand Junction, and he says if he could have his choice between all the money spent looking for uranium or all the money made selling uranium, he'd take the money spent looking. He knew them all - all those crazy dogholers in the glowing dust with their glowing dreams and madly ticking Geiger counters.

Lavar is still silent, and we're soon dropping into a deep canyon. I hold my breath as we twist and turn, following the narrow course of Muddy Creek, now losing altitude until our wing tips nearly touch each side of the canyon, or so it seems. I grin, not sure what to think, but by now I know Lavar Wells could fly anywhere - and I'd happily go along for the ride.

Down, down, like slow-pouring buttermilk, and I see a series of pourovers coming down the canyon wall, where frost and water have dripped and etched sand particles away, gradually molding a perfect place for waterpockets, each now filled with a jewel of reflecting sun on water from the recent rain.

Muddy Creek turns again, and now I can almost reach out and touch junipers and desert holly that jut out from the canyon walls. Another twist and we're nearly down in the creek, when suddenly I see a red windsock and what maybe just might be an old road. Without to-do we're on the ground, and how Lavar can land this little plane so smooth on this little dirt strip grown with weeds is a mystery. You'd better know right where that strip lies, too, cause you sure as H-E-double-hockeysticks can't see it till you're right on it. "That's just a little taste of canyon flying," Lavar grins, turning the plane around.

We step out, and the falling call of a canyon wren echoes off the canyon walls. Secondary echoes come back, on and on, until it sounds like an entire flock fading in the distance - but like true desert rats, canyon wrens don't flock.

Lavar stretches, turns, gazing up at the red ramparts above us that hold the Hidden Splendor Mine. "I like to land in these places and get out of the plane, let the passengers feel what it's like out here. Nothing like it anywhere."

Several doghole mines form dark cavities in the rusty sandstone above us - the holes look old and abandoned. When the longhairs at Los Alamos invented the Bomb, a mad uranium scramble began that changed the San Rafael forever. Lavar knows all about that madness, his dad flew in it, and he flew in the second U-boom of the 60s.

Wisps of white clouds dance slowly across a turquoise-blue sky. I kick at something, a piece of weathered wood, pick it up and turn it over. Hercules Dynamite. Hercules himself, way out here in this God-forsaken desert. The same Hercules responsible for the doghole mines above me in the cliff bands.

I stand silent for a long time, soaking it all in. There's something about the vertical bluffs and twisting canyons out here, something that makes you want to be alone, go wild, feral, forget civilization.

"Just leave me out here, Lavar," I say.

"I could do that," he replies, grinning.

"Should've brought a picnic," he adds. Soon, we take off, scooting along that sandy two-track towards dark cliffs that cradle the far edge of the brushy runway.

The climbing sun turns cliffs deep red - they're bounded by rubble, rocks climbing each other, scrambling for the best views.

Now we're back in the air, and Lavar's going to show me what he calls a "river slot." We bank the plane over Hondu Arch, really just a big hole in the cliffs, then we're suddenly on another planet, for what I'm seeing below me is like nothing on earth. Lavar nods at the huge crack that's opened beneath us - it's the Chute of Muddy Creek, that infamous slot canyon that stretches for over 15 miles, twisting its way through an underground world filled with flashflood debris 20 feet above the creek. We circle for awhile, but it never looks real.

Now we're slipping back towards the Reef, and suddenly the chalky white ramps of Temple Mountain thrust skyward beneath us, rotten and unclimbable.

With each fierce desert rain, the chalks fall and tumble to the washes far below, then on down Temple Wash, where it cuts down from the uplands of the Swell, then on down to the twisting Dirty Devil, and eventually down to the grander adventures of the Colorado River.

A small sidetrack forks off and crosses the wash, winding to the flanks of the mountain, stopping immediately under a half-dozen small holes that glare like gaping black eyes with gray tailings crying, spilling out. More uranium mines, dogholes. We fly on.

Finally, all too soon, back at Canyonlands Field, we land, get out of the little plane, taking a moment to recover our land legs. Far to the west, probably right over the Hidden Splendor, hangs a gilded cloud, suspended by cool air. A few clouds float further north, peach and gold from sun's fading rays, hanging in the direction of Temple Mountain.

Maybe I'll be back tomorrow, I muse, let tomorrow's warm air currents take me and Lavar and his little Cessna wherever those clouds may go. Maybe we'll fly north over the Bookcliffs, those intimidating high bluffs where cougars and black bear nap on ramparts, watching farmers irrigate melon fields far below in the little town of Green River. Or maybe over the colorful red and white bands of the Needles, the dry grasses of Beef Basin, or the wild slopes of Dark Canyon. Most likely, though, we'll be back off to the San Rafael, Lavar's second home, for another taste of canyon flying, off to high adventure.

Originally from Colorado, Chinle Miller writes from the wildlands of Colorado and Utah, while also working as a part-time archaeologist..