Sacred Waters

To help heal from a traumatic loss, Jim Kristofic seeks solace in Horseshoe Bend, on the Colorado River.

- Jim Kristofi

WHEN VISITORS WALK to the edge of Glen Canyon, in northern Arizona, they see a landmark W Canyon, that's known around the world: Horseshoe Bend. It's a round cliff of orange sandstone, carved by the green water of Tóóh Bikooh, the Navajo name for the Colorado River. I've swum in that current countless times, first as a kid, after my family moved to the Navajo Nation when I was seven years old, and later as a river guide in my teens and 20s. To the Navajo people, those waters are so old and powerful that words like epoch and millennia are meaningless.

What many visitors might not know is that Horseshoe Bend is just one of many places in this region where the Anasazi, Paiute, and Diné (the Indigenous name for Navajo) tribes grew crops, hunted, and lived and died for centuries. It's also where I would have brought my daughter, if she had grown old enough to paddle a kayak.

In 1963, the Sierra Club announced that Glen Canyon, a stretch of nearly 200 miles of twisting, sinewy rock walls snaking from southern Utah into northern Arizona, was dead. It was being drowned in the water rising behind the Glen Canyon Dam, a 710-foot-tall wall of concrete built over the course of the previous decade. The new body of water was christened Lake Powell. The human rights of local Indigenous communities, who relied on the canyon for food and shelter, and as a setting for their spiritual rites, were blithely ignored. Only 16 miles of the canyon, including Horseshoe Bend, were spared. The majority of the ecosystem, along with more than 3,000 ancient archaeological home sites, was destroyed.