A much better way to go, especially around here, is solar. As Ralph Nader has said, "Bring on the sun."  Sunshine the one thing that the Southwest has an unlimited supply of, that isn't subject to the boom and bust cycles, the rabid speculation, boondoggles and make-work "reclamation" projects that have characterized the history of the Great American desert. The Spanish utility Accione is funding a solar farm south of Las Vegas, New Mexico and has signed a memorandum to investigate a larger Navajo solar project that Paul is involved in.
It could produce eighty megawatts on 400 acres.  In comparison the how many coal plants in the four corners area generate 2000 megawatts. One megawatt is a thousand kilowatts. One kilowatt supplies the energy to turn on ten 100 watt light bulbs. When you add the projects of  how many other companies, each with 2000-3000 acres, 1200-1500 renewable, non-polluting megawatts could end up being produced in Dinetah.

       The Southwest has been the scene of some of the pioneering work on sun-powered self-sufficiency. Steve Bear of Albuquerque, whom I profiled in my book, could set you up off the grid out in the desert for fourteen grand in l992. Now it costs more like twice that. The Southwest could be the prototype of solar. Already in Mojave desert. Google, Chevron and Goldman Sachs are partners in a 1,000-acre solar plant, with 550,000 mirrors pointing skyward to make steam for electricity for as many as 112,500 homes in southern California. "Solar thermal with natural gas prices rising will be the fast-growing energy source in the next decade," says  Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems, a big software company, who is involved in a 40-million-dollar venture. "Solar thermal could produce more than 50% of our power-- an industrial-strength solution." Reese Risadle, senior analyst at theconsulting firm Emerging Energy Research, estimates solar thermal could attract more than $85 billion in investments by 2020.

      However, solar panels requires silver—more mining. The British merchant bankers, the Fortis group, estimates that over 1,000 tonnes of silver will be used in 2008 to manufacture solar panels, twice what was used in 2002, and this is only going to increase, silver being the most conductive of metals and a necessary component of solar energy capture. Hybrid cars, moreover, require twice as much copper as conventional gas-guzzlers, and there are 14 to 20 kilos of nickel in every hybrid's nickel-hybride battery and electronic system. One third of the platinum that is currently being mined  goes into the catalytic converters on non-hybrids, to control their emissions. So mining and its ghastly impacts, toxic chemicals seeping into groundwater and poisoning ecosystems, etc.,  are not about to stop any time soon.

       Solar and wind are  the future for this part of the world. The only pollution from wind turbines is visual, and Andre and I drove past a smallish wind farm  below Provo whose visual impact wasn't bad at all. Joe Kennedy (the environmentalist Bobby junior's older brother)'s company,  Ctizen's Energy, is partnering with the Dine Power Authority on  wind farm near Cameron that will be largest renewable source of energy for the Navajo nation.
 

     We're running from mile 49 to 141, so we have to do thirty miles a day. The river is rising a few inches each night as more water is released from MacPhee dam, so the rafts will be getting a little more current, which means less rowing for Mike and Travis.  The first night where we set up our tents there is a mild frost, and each day gets hotter, more plants are in bloom, more birds are in song, until when we reach Gateway it's ninety degrees, and our faces and arms and legs will be sunburned. We eat well, Mike being a pro in the kitchen as well and Travis having brought deer and elk sausage and jerky. He shot the elk and his brothers back in Iowa, where he is originally from, the deer.
     I see all kinds of faces and figures and craggy profiles in the redrock cliffs, some the product of erosion, others of the black streaks of manganese oxide mixed with clay particles known as desert varnish.

I've never passed through such an animistic, anthropomorphic landscape. We're moving slow enough to make them out. Some day I'll have to come back here with big telefoto lenses and do a foto book.

     The people who lived here before Europeans burst on the scene were Anasazi cliffdwellers who did lots of petroglyphs and paintings of animals and half-animal, half-human theriomorphs which were shamanic visions  but also accurate depictions of the faces and figures in the slickrock walls and of the animals they hunted and whose ways and spirits they were in intimate communication with.
In Slickrock Canyon, the highpoint of the trip, which we spend an afternoon and a morning in, we stop at a spectacular site, a long scalloped alcove of overhanging pure khaki-red sandstone with a small herd of maybe pronghorn antelopes painted on it. This place is magnificent. What a place to have lived in, what a life to have lived.
Below the alcove, the river pushes off the cliff, which runs sheer and vertical and a hundred feet high for several hundred yards. We watch a peregrine falcon  stoop, diving straight down at a hundred plus miles an hour with its wings folded on a swallow which manages to dodge it with a sudden last minute acrobatic move, and to live another day.
A cluster of small prickly-paddled cacti, not prickly pears, maybe cholla or teddy-bear, is in brilliant red flower. Mike, who says he is "a student of history," finds an ancient abandoned pack-rat midden in a crevice, a spew of grey dung, pebbles, cactus spines, twigs,  and other debris semi-cemented by crystallized urine. Middens are great time capsules for paleobotanists and students of history like Mike.  I can see why human compulsive hoarders are called pack rats.

    "Can you believe that back in the Cold War all this was declared a national sacrifice area ?" marvels Mark. "The government was prepared to let the whole Four Corners area, one of the most magical places on earth, be destroyed for its uranium."

     The Utes weren't as badly impacted by the earlier booms simply because by then there were only a few thousand of them, due to the ethnic cleansing performed on them in the nineteenth century by the Mormons and other European settlers of Colorado and Utah. The Ute Removal, as it was called, began in the l840s when the first Mormons, who considered them to be  Lamanites, blighted with dark skin for their wickedness. Then gold was discovered in Colorado, and the genocide began in earnest. Today there are only three thousand Utes.

They have a casino and are much richer than their white neighbors. If mining resumes here, the native cultural impact will not be as great as if it starts happening on Mount Taylor, where's there's going to be hell to pay. Washington will have a major Navajo uprising on its hands.
 
 

       After eight hours of speechless wonder in Slickrock Canyon, we come out of it at a place called Bedrock, and just below Bedrock the San Miguel comes in, augmenting the Dolores considerably. After the meeting with the San Miguel,  oak posts pounded into holes every few feet in the right canyon wall, begin to appear a hundred feet or more above the river, gradually descending toward the water level over the next ten miles. This is the famous Hanging Flume of the Dolores, one of the world's most extraordinary monuments to human folly and greed.
Its purpose was to deliver water to a gold placer mine. Construction started in 1889.A million feet of lumber were used to build the flume, which was designed to deliver 80 million gallons a day to the mine, and the posts that held it aloft. The laborers were Greeks and Italians. Some died, some survived and their descendants live in Durango and other places in southerwestern Colorado, or are long gone to other regions with more promise of realizing the American Dream.

The investors in London lost their shirts, $175,000 before the company declared bankruptcy. The mine, which did not yield the gold it was supposed to, was finally abandoned in the l890s. All that remains of the hanging flume are the posts, but they are solid and the structure was recently named to the 100 Most Endangered Sites list of the World Monuments Fund, joining the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and Pompeii. "This flume is still going," Mike Black marvels after several miles of posts. "These people were out of their fucking mind. The guys in London sold their shares and went on to the next scam. The purpose of mining is to make money, more often by scamming investors than extracting the mineral." Placer mines go after the gold between terraces of sediment, the alluvial deposits in ancient riverbeds.
Water is brought down in sluices and flumes, the material washes away and heavier gold stays. The simplest method of placer mining is panning.

        At mile 118 we pass Rock Creek, a little stream on the left bank, where the samples  of uranium-bearing ore from which  Madame Curie discovered radium were obtained and shipped to Paris. She analyzed the samples for vanadium, what they were looking for, and found this strange new mineral that glowed in the dark.  Up to 1928 half the world's radium came from the Uravan Mining District. Radium was used for luminescent dials of watches,  clocks, switches, and instrument panels. Even though 100 watch painters died of radioactivity from licking brushes to make a point, radium dials kept being made until the  late fifties. Miners of pitchblende in Bohemia started getting lung cancer in l875, and there was a lot of cancer among painters using luminescent paint in the thirties, "so the feds knew that radium was lethal, yet they sent  Navajo men into the uranium mines," Paul seethes. The ore zone is in the lower level of the Morrison sandstone formation, above the Entrada formation. As we go downstream and descend in elevation, the ore zone rises from five hundred to a thousand feet above the river until it is up on the mesas, way back from the water. Some of the distant redwalled mesas have green scree beneath them, from copper leached into them. The palette of the desert Southwest never ceases to surprise. Georgia O'Keefe was only painting what is there.

      The river winds lazily through Paradox Valley,  a pastoral interlude from the redrock canyonland, with cows and huge old cottonwoods on the banks. "This could be a solar farm instead of a uranium mill," Paul says.

        90% of what we do is unnecessary and destructive, I reflect, but mining is the worst. I recall my first exposure to its horrors, in Jamaica, l970. I was staying with a beautiful woman in a bungalow in Bamboo, inland from Oche Rios, that belonged to Reynolds Aluminum. It was my first time in the tropics, and behind the bungalow there was a patch of lush rainforest alive with brilliant little birds, emerald toadies and streamer-tailed doctor birds. Behind the rainforest were two hills that had been literally decapitated at the neck and were oozing red lateric soil like blood. I've never been able to look at anything made of aluminum the same way again. When I see a package of cheese cubes, half an inch on a side, individually wrapped in tin foil, my stomach seizes a little. It seems criminal.

       Do we really need to be mining anything anymore  ?There are so many metals already out there, waiting to be recycled. The Chinese are mining e-waste and getting twenty times more gold and other rare precious minerals like coltan from a ton of old cellphones, than they would from the richest ore on earth. They've got a head-start on us in this lucrative new endeavor. Shouldn't we be focusing on reusing everything we already have ? This goes for plastics and paper, too, of course. According to  Price Waterhouse Coopers' annual review of the mining industry, operating costs for the top 40 companies leapt 38 percent in 2007, easily outpacing the 32 % gain in profit of $80 billion.

       Why do we have to mine anything anymore anyway ?  To make money. And there's enough people who strike it rich to keep others in the game. I went to pick up one of my boys at a friend's house in Montreal and he was bouncing on a trampoline in a garden across the street that belonged to a geologist who had just discovered a gold seam in the Val d'Or of Quebec, 250 miles northwest of Montreal, worth an estimated $80 billion and made himself forty million.

      It's surprising there aren't more claims in this gorgeous country. It only costs how much to stake out how many acres on public BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, and you can build a shack, put in electricity, a well, and other improvements, and live there. All you have to do is make a desultory effort every once in a while to find the minerals you filed the claim to look for, dig a hole or two.  It's a method of homesteading a good thing not many people know about.

     The vegetation gets lush as we see the Palisades in the distance, and the bird life gets increasingly intense and vociferous. The Willows are full of colorful warblers just up from Central and South America. We see herons, mergansers, a flock of small birds with pointed bills that flash pure white as they take off ahead of us. Mike Black has never seen these birds before. They aren't baby mergansers, he says, which take to the water and fish for themselves within ten days of being born. "I know mergansers," he says. "They're my friends." After we all get home, he e-mails us that the look just like  the picture of the  northern or red-necked phalarope in his bird book. But according to my bird book (Singer's field guide)) northern pharalopes are pelagic during their migration, they stay way out at sea. It seems more likely they were Wilson's phalaropes, if they were phalaropes at all, large migratory flocks of which visit Great Salt Lake in the spring, feeding on the brine shrimp. I still vote for immature mergansers, due to their whiteness,  But Mike is convinced they were northern phalaropes, and nothing is going to change his mind, and maybe he's right. "There are a lot of mysteries in these canyons," as he argues.

"I have seen strange birds nearly every time I have gone into them in the spring."

         Our last campsite is within earshot of big trucks full of ore roaring by every fifteen minutes on Route 90, which runs along the Dolores to Gateway. Paul thinks they're probably full of the uranium-enriched broken rock 500,000 pounds of which have been stockpiled since l981 on the mesas above the Dolores, headed for the White Mesa mill in Blanding, Utah to be processed and sold into the nuclear fuel cycle.

       Wouldn't it be great if this boom fizzles out before any actual mining goes on? Maybe the new no-bid contracts that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and BP have just won in Iraq, beating out China, Indian, and Russia (what we have known the war was really about all along) will take some of the pressure off. It really depends on Obama, whether he embraces the nuclear renaissance or other alternative energy options, and he says at this point he isn't ruling anything out. McCain has already come out for stepping up nuclear power as a means of getting us out of our "dangerous" dependence on foreign oil and reducing America's huge role in global warming.