Astronauts play house with biologists and engineers in a three-domed structure in a place that physically resembles Mars. Some residents of Hanksville hold odd jobs out at the space station, so stories of astronauts climbing over red boulders in full space gear are common here.
I tell her about my vacation, how I am out looking for animals. She asks, and I tell her: Ground squirrels. The ferruginous hawk. Some endangered subspecies of pupfish. When I leave the diner, though, I am thinking about those astronauts, awkward in their space suits. Introduced species.
Some people believe that this great region will someday be connected to a series of unbroken lands – extending perhaps into Canada and Mexico. It will be like a giant research laboratory, but not for Mars, for Earth. And talk will be about how this land once was.
Already, people are talking about how condors will again soar above these skies. Others, still, talk about when jaguars will again roam the southern reaches of these canyons. And others, they are talking about elephants on the mesas, and camels in the canyons.
I am on my way to Glen Canyon, to find out why.
Shapes and color of a canyon wall near Sipapu Bridge,
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