On a cool March night atop Black Mesa, a fire crackled against the dark sky. To a circle of rapt listeners, Vernon Masayesva recounted Hopi legends while his guests ate the thin, parchment-like bread traditionally served to visitors, made from blue corn and soot. Every so often his cousin Jerry would stir the fire, sending sparks swirling up around Vernon's head, rising toward the stars above.
The mesa, the guests learned, is the center of the earth for the Hopi people who have lived there for hundreds of years. Beneath it lies a breathing aquifer, drawing in rain and snow and exhaling it in the form of springs. The springs are breathing holes, passageways from the mesa's surface to Paatuuwaqatsi, the sacred water world below.
Out here on the Hopi Reservation, high atop the Colorado Plateau in northern Arizona, Don Hopey was a long way from his Pittsburgh home, where he is the environment reporter for the Post-Gazette. Here, he was a student, and Masayesva was his teacher for the evening.
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| Don Hopey in Jackass Canyon (Photo/Greg Stahl) |
As president of the Black Mesa Trust, Masayesva heads an organization whose mission is to "safeguard, preserve and honor the land and water of Black Mesa." The trust was formed in 1999 by the Hopi people in response to the damage that extensive water withdrawals by the Peabody Coal Company have caused to the Navajo Aquifer beneath Hopi and Navajo lands on the mesa. For nearly 30 years Peabody had been pumping 3.3 million gallons of water a day for its coal slurry operation, causing wells and washes to run dry and ancient springs to vanish, threatening the life and culture of the mesa's inhabitants.
While the Black Mesa Trust relies also on Western science and technology to educate people about environmental impacts, traditional Hopi stories are part of the truth the Trust seeks to impart. For Hopey and the others gathered round the fire, there was power in such poetry.
"It was a magical experience," Hopey said, recalling that night.
As a Ted Scripps Fellow, Hopey visited Black Mesa as part of an 8-day trip around the Colorado Plateau that he and two other fellows participated in during spring break at the University of Colorado. The field tour was a class unlike any other: officially titled Seminar in Advanced Natural Resource Law, the course covered some 2,000 miles of desert, canyon, mountain and mesa while educating students about a range of issues including water, energy, grazing, mining and tribal concerns.
"It was the absolute highlight of the fellowship," said Bebe Crouse, previously National Public Radio's environment editor in Washington, D.C., a position that included a focus on the West.
"No question," Hopey agreed.
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| Bebe Crouse captures the sounds of the high desert (Photo/Greg Stahl) |
Greg Stahl, on leave from the Idaho Mountain Express in Sun Valley where he is the public land and environment reporter, rounded out the Scripps Fellows contingent. The fellows joined 13 CU law students and Professor Charles Wilkinson for the grand high-country loop that took them to Durango, Mexican Hat, Lake Powell, Cedar Mesa, Window Rock, the Grand Canyon, Paria Plateau and Jackass Canyon before returning to Boulder.
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| Greg Stahl surveys the Colorado Plateau |
Wilkinson, who is a Distinguished Professor of Law at CU and an expert on natural resource and public lands issues, has been leading the field seminar for ____ years.
Wilkinson himself is nearly as charismatic a draw as the Plateau's enticing landscapes, according to his students. Typically found in jeans and cowboy boots, admired for his integrity and beloved for his sharp good humor, Wilkinson is the antithesis of the uptight lawyer. His lectures are more captivating narrative than legalese, and the wide-open spaces of the Plateau are a suitably appropriate setting for his teaching.
"Charles Wilkinson's field classes are legendary," said Crouse, who had heard of the professor before arriving at CU to begin her fellowship.
Like Crouse, Hopey was impressed with past fellows' recommendations of his introductory course on natural resources law. After taking that class with her and Stahl during the fall semester, he jumped at the chance to visit the Plateau with Wilkinson.
"He's someone who has a reputation and knowledge of this area that's unparalleled," Hopey said. "Every day on this field tour he gave us these gifts of expertise – from meetings with tribal leaders to out-of-the-way places like Jackass Canyon where tourists never go…His enthusiasm for the subject is infectious."
"He's so completely passionate about this place," said Crouse.
For Stahl, study in the field brought issues alive in a way that doesn't happen in the confines of a classroom.
"There's nothing like cementing textbook reading by seeing what's happening on the ground, " said Stahl. "I can't overstate how much the trip helped me more fully understand the issues we discussed in the seminar."
"It makes everything more real," Crouse agreed, who was able to see places she had assigned stories on yet had never been to, such as Black Mesa and the Navajo Reservation.
Stahl found the camaraderie with the other students equally absorbing. "The classroom atmosphere is sometimes stifling, and it was really nice to get to know people on a more personal level. And that, of course, leads to a freer exchange of ideas."
Given the logistics of the trip, it was inevitable the students would get to know one another well. The group of 17 drove together from Boulder in Wilkinson's SUV, a pick-up truck and several Subarus, staying en route at motels where they sometimes had to share beds, given tight space and a tight budget.
While some of the time they were inside listening to PowerPoint presentations by officials, most of the learning took place outdoors amid the remarkable geological and cultural features of the Plateau.
A moving experience for Crouse was exploring Moon House on Utah's remote Cedar Mesa. The group walked in to the ancient Puebloan ruin with archaeologists and a BLM administrator, and it was "as if we'd discovered it," she said.
"It was a spectacularly beautiful place, even without the ruins," said Crouse, describing the water that had spilled down the face of the slick rock and frozen, leaving icy waterfalls on the stone walls. "It was a really magical, spiritual feeling in there."
The fellows also reveled in hikes up Utah's Dirty Devil River and into Jackass Canyon, which were no small adventures.
The group's guide from the Glen Canyon Institute said, "We're gonna take this little hike – your feet might get a little wet," Crouse said, describing the Dirty Devil trip. They ended up forging their way upstream, pushing against the current, the water above their knees. The reward was an excursion into a maze of swirling slickrock and crenellated canyon walls.
Jackass Canyon was equally dramatic.
Hopey recounted the descent, accompanied by a learned naturalist, into the narrow slot canyon that plummets to the Colorado River on the floor of the Grand Canyon below.
"We had to negotiate these huge rocks that had tumbled down between the canyon walls, which were 150 to 200 feet high."
Stahl reflected that "while the educational parts of the trip were enlightening," it was during such recreational outings that the group really bonded, tossing ideas around in a casual atmosphere while sharing the majesty of the Plateau's natural marvels.
All three fellows concurred that the field tour provided experiences that will transform them as journalists.
Stahl, who is returning to Idaho, comes away with deeper insight into the resource and tribal issues that comprise a fair portion of his beat. There are implications from the Southern Ute water rights issues he studied on the trip, including the massive Animas La Plata dam project, that are significant for his coverage of the Nez Perce and Shoshone-Bannock reservations.
Crouse, too, said she understands "a lot more of the complexities of tribal issues" as a result of her exposure to Wilkinson's classes and the in-person meetings with tribal leaders during the tour.
Especially with regard to water and energy issues, "the tribes are players now," said Hopey. "The energy resources they have on the reservations has given them the power to be players," and that adds a whole new layer in need of understanding, the fellows have come to recognize.
"It's hard to get really good, deep coverage" of the tribes, said Crouse, who appreciates the challenges created by the "cultural divide." "It's a very delicate, difficult little dance," she said, acknowledging she is now more empathetic to reporters who are trying to cover tribal issues.
She also found the field tour helpful context for her fellowship project, a study of the future of ranching in the West. While her focus has been Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington, she said it was illuminating to "go down and look at the places where they are trying to graze cattle" in the Southwest, where water is actually piped in to sustain the herds.
For Hopey, the exposure to mining issues was most relevant. In Pittsburgh, he is far removed from many Western concerns such as grazing permits and arcane water law, but coal mining in particular is a big story in western Pennsylvania.
"My mining stuff is going to be very much impacted" by the fellowship, Hopey said. He is currently working on a coal mining story that takes off from Vernon's campfire oration, discussing the recent shutdown of the Mojave generating plant and resulting closure of Peabody's Black Mesa Mine.
And there were other unexpected connections on the Colorado Plateau with Hopey's life back in Pittsburgh. As the students were entering the Navajo Council Chambers for a presentation, he spotted a guy with two long braids who happened to be wearing a Steelers tie. Instant bond. Hopey discovered that the fellow fan, a Navajo named Frank Seanez, grew up in Pittsburgh and was now an attorney for the Navajo Nation, representing the tribe from its headquarters in Window Rock.
On the Colorado Plateau, modernity is interwoven with timelessness. Science complements myth in a quest to preserve natural resources and ancient ways of life. Policy both protects, and potentially threatens, vulnerable landscapes. These and other lessons the Fellows learned in their sojourn through the pink sandstone and cobalt skies of this vast high desert. While the land may have appeared parched and tormented, beneath their feet streams breathed, and springs bubbled sacred secrets to the surface.
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