| OCR Text |
Show 260 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER 10,000-foot-high Navajo Mountain, it is not accessible by car. In 1959, before the completion of Glen Canyon Dam and the approach of Lake Powell, seeing the bridge required a two-day pack trip northeast from lodges at the base of Navajo Mountain, or riverboat trips down the Colorado River and hik ing up Forbidding and Bridge canyons. The setting is so spec tacular that Zane Grey wrote the novel Rainbow Bridge that gives the natural bridge a mystical aspect; indeed, the bridge fig ures prominently in the religion of the Navajo Indians as a sym bol of rainfall and fertility. The bridge was discovered by white men in 1909, was set aside as a national monument in 1910, and became one of the most isolated and hard-to-reach units of the National Park Service. Irving S. Cobb wrote that the area was "where Old Marster stacked it up and scooped it out and shuffled it togeth er again so violently, so completely, and with such incredibly beautiful tonings, with such inconceivably awesome results."? There is, in the country, a vivid eternal peace, vastness, and power. There is desert dryness, as well as solitude, yet, Bridge Canyon, spanned by Rainbow Bridge, "was a lush green oasis, spattered with brilliant flowers.":' Frank Waters, a Colorado-born historian and novelist, before his The Colorado, published in 1963, had written three fiction al works on the region and its people: The Dust Within the Rock (1940), People of the Valley (1941), and, probably the one read by Madelyn, The Man who Killed the Deer (1942). His theme was the search for and acceptance of the mystical meaning of life embedded in the unique natural formations. To traverse the slanting surfaces of the plateaus, mesas, and mountains in the area is hazardous because of the slickrock. The occasion of the hike was an invitation in June 1959 to the Silvers from Leland and Alice Redd of Blanding, Utah, to join a boating expedition to travel down the Colorado River. Redd, son of Leland and Alice, was leading the expedi Wayne tion. Alice Redd was the former Alice V. Hunter who had been associate editor of The University Pen when Madelyn was the editor. Like Madelyn, Alice wrote stories and poems for University Pen. Madelyn and Alice had retained their friendship |
