The Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) is interested in understanding the human and environmental consequences of past Glen Canyon Dam water release policies and using these data to inform future water release and land management policies. One step in this direction is to understand how American Indian people have used the Colorado River and adjoining lands in Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon. The BOR, through its Glen Canyon Environmental Studies (GCES) office, has provided funds for various American Indian groups to identify places and things of cultural significance in the 300 mile long river and canyon ecosystem that has come to be called the Colorado River Corridor. This study is the second to report on the cultural resources of the Southern Paiute people found in this riverine ecosystem. The rock art study funded by the BOR and managed by the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies (GCES) office is the basis of this report. This study is unique in the history of rock art studies and is unusual when compared with other American Indian cultural resource assessments. There are five unique features of this study. First, all funds for conducting the research were contracted to the Southern Paiute Consortium. Second, the Southern Paiute people decided during the previous studies that their next study would be about rock art. Third, the GCES /BOR permitted research to be conducted in terms of Paiute perceptions of the study area rather than specifically in terms of the scientifically established study area for the project. Thus, it was possible to conduct the Kanab Creek side canyon study. Fourth, all interviews were guided by a ten -page survey instrument, so Southern Paiute responses could be systematically compared. Fifth, both all-male and all- female research trips were conducted, thus producing the first gender - specific interviews of rock art sites. The resulting study is both interdisciplinary and multivocal.

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The traditional lands of the Southern Paiute people are bounded by more than 600 miles of Piapaxa (Colorado River) from the Kaiparowits Plateau in the north to Blythe, California in the south. According to traditional beliefs, Southern Paiute people were created in this traditional land and, through this creation, the Creator gave Paiute people a special supernatural responsibility to protect and manage this land including its water and natural resources. Puaxantu Tuvip (sacred land) is the term that refers to traditional ethnic territory. Within these lands no place was more special than Piapaxa 'uipi (Big River Canyon) where the Colorado River cuts through the Grand Canyon.

This report concludes the first four years (1992 -1995) of Southern Paiute involvement in the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies (GCES), a program initiated by the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) in 1982. Southern Paiutes have conducted ethnographic research and participated in the Congressionally mandated Environmental Impact Study (EIS) of Glen Canyon Dam water release policies on natural and human-made resources found in the Colorado River Corridor. These ethnographic studies have taken place in what is called the Colorado River Corridor which extends 255 miles down stream from Glen Canyon Dam to the end of the free flowing river at Separation Canyon within the Grand Canyon National Park. They have concentrated on investigating the impacts of the Dam's water releases to Southern Paiute cultural resources. Since the Final EIS was published in March 1995, emphasis has been placed on what is called the Adaptive Management Program of the GCES and attention has shifted to monitoring the water release impacts.

The historically introduced House Rock Valley bison herd has, in recent years, migrated from the eastern Arizona Strip onto the Kaibab Plateau within Grand Canyon National Park. Bison are considered a nonnative species to the southern Colorado Plateau, and the animals adversely impact sensitive ecosystems prompting National Park Service wildlife managers to pursue their removal. Archaeofaunal evidence of bison in the Grand Canyon and neighboring regions, however, raises concern that bison may in fact be native. Assessing the evidence within a zooarchaeological interpretive framework is critical since mere presence/absence lists of bison remains do not address the potentially complex cultural processes involved in the formation of archaeofaunal assemblages. Inter-assemblage comparisons illustrate a decline in relative abundance and skeletal completeness correlated to distance from traditionally understood historical bison distribution. If bison were present in the Southwest, as the evidence suggests, they likely entered the region only occasionally as small, dispersed herds.

In Recreating Nature: Ecocritical Readings of Yosemite and Grand Canyon, I examine the intersections of culture and nature in two prominent national parks, and I consider the implications of nature-tourism in the environmental discourse of the U.S. Covering a period from 1848 to the present, my project aims to correct an oversight in scholarship about the park system, in which legacies of colonialism and imperialism--when addressed at all--tend to be historicized and framed as the age-old sins of a presumably reformed national politic. Instead, I examine both historical and present-day developments, emphasizing the profound cultural influence of the places we designate as natural. I define ecocriticism as an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor attuned to the interconnectedness of things. My methodology is to engage texts, images and other expressions of the national parks in a process of extended close reading and comparative analysis. While observing the particular contexts of each case, I attempt to locate these texts amidst the broadest but most essential critical terrain: they each negotiate a dialogical relationship between culture and nature. By setting the stage for examining the human and its relation to the non-human other, the parks have become key sites for displaying the recreation of nature. After my introduction I discuss John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra, focusing on an episode where Muir risks his life for a view from Yosemite Falls. I also consider Muir's failure to empathize with Native Americans he encountered. In my next chapter I analyze John Wesley Powell's Exploration by focusing on his attempt to assert authority over a region by prioritizing the scientific tone in his writing. Next I synthesize historical and contemporary sources, discussing Mary Colter's Grand Canyon architecture alongside the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass-bottom walkway on the Hualapai Indian reservation. In the following chapter I compare the acrophobia-inducing photographs of George Fiske and Emery Kolb. Finally, I discuss transit real and imagined in Grand Canyon and Yosemite, considering the utopian potential of national parks. I close by revisiting questions about our changing environmental discourse and about the future of ecocriticism.

abstract: This research examines lateral separation zones and sand bar slope stability using two methods: a parallelized turbulence resolving model and full-scale laboratory experiments. Lateral flow separation occurs in rivers where banks exhibit strong curvature, for instance canyon rivers, sharp meanders and river confluences. In the Colorado River, downstream Glen Canyon Dam, lateral separation zones are the principal storage of sandbars. Maximum ramp rates have been imposed to Glen Canyon Dam operation to minimize mass loss of sandbars. Assessment of the effect of restricting maximum ramp rates in bar stability is conducted using multiple laboratory experiments. Results reveal that steep sandbar faces would rapidly erode by mass failure and seepage erosion to stable slopes, regardless of dam discharge ramp rates. Thus, continued erosion of sand bars depends primarily of turbulent flow and waves. A parallelized, three-dimensional, turbulence resolving model is developed to study flow structures in two lateral separation zones located along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. The model employs a Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) technique where variables larger than the grid scale are fully resolved, while Sub-Grid-Scale (SGS) variables are modeled. The DES-3D model is validated using ADCP flow measurements and skill metric scores show predictive capabilities of simulated flow. The model reproduces the patterns and magnitudes of flow velocity in lateral recirculation zones, including size and position of primary and secondary eddy cells and return current. Turbulence structures with a predominately vertical axis of vorticity are observed in the shear layer, becoming three-dimensional without preferred orientation downstream. The DES-3D model is coupled with a sediment advection-diffusion formulation, wherein advection is provided by the DES velocity field minus particles settling velocity, and diffusion is provided by the SGS. Results show a lateral recirculation zone having a continuous export and import of sediment from and to the main channel following a pattern of high frequency pulsations of positive deposition fluxes. These high frequency pulsations play an important role to prevent an oversupply of sediment within the lateral separation zones. Improved predictive capabilities are achieved with this model when compared with previous two- and three-dimensional quasi steady and steady models. / Dissertation/Thesis / Appendix C Video 3.1 / Appendix C Video 3.2 / Appendix C Video 3.3 / Appendix C Video 3.4 / Appendix C Video 3.5 / Appendix C Video 3.6 / Appendix C Video 3.7 / Appendix F Video 4.1.a / Appendix F Video 4.1.b / Appendix F Video 4.2 / Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2015

The role of bedrock on the longitudinal profile of the Colorado River has intrigued workers for over a century. The river's profile exhibits large-scale (10 to 100 km) variations in geomorphology that are qualitatively associated with changes in rock type. This study provides the first bedrock-strength data to quantitatively test the relation of bedrock-resisting to hydraulic-driving forces in Glen and Grand canyons. The intent of this study is to explore the role, if any, that bedrock has on large-scale geomorphic variations along the profile of the Colorado River. Rock-strength data collected at 84 sites along the river corridor in Glen and Grand canyons include intact-rock strength, fracture spacing , and other characteristics associated with Selby rock-mass strength (RMS). These strength data were statistically related to measurements of channel width, gradient, and calculations of unit stream power. At the canyon scale (100 km), rocks in Grand Canyon have significantly higher intact-rock strength, lower fracture spacing, and higher RMS than those in Glen Canyon. These observations correspond to the fact that Grand Canyon is steeper and narrower, and has greater mean unit stream power. Furthermore, smaller scale, reach-average values of rock strength correlate significantly to width, gradient, and unit stream power, although there are outliers related to local-scale effects such as rapids. The Colorado River runs in a narrower and steeper channel in reaches confined by resistant bedrock ( e.g., Upper Granite Gorge, RM 77-114). In contrast , reaches floored in weaker bedrock (e.g., lower Marble Canyon, river miles 37 to 58) are associated with wider channels and lower gradient. This study confirms previous research linking rock type to the geomorphology of the Colorado River. Results imply that knickzones in the profile are persistent features that reflect a dynamic equilibrium between hydraulic-driving and bedrock-resisting forces, rather than transient waves of incision due to tectonics or drainage integration. They support the hypothesis that bedrock sets the long-term, large-scale template for the Colorado River. Bedrock hypothetically acts as a direct control on the river's width and gradient, particularly when the river is in contact with bedrock. Rock-strength and weathering properties of bedrock within tributary catchments, where debris flows initiate, act as an indirect control through their influence on hillslope-to-river sediment production during episodes, such as today, when the river is not on bedrock.

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