Forty Feet in a Year

Word to the wise, friend. Never trust a surveyor who's leaning on a buckboard and looking thoughtful. This one's a family's story, and the park's own page passes it along with a straight face, so I will too. John R. Stewart and Quinby, his half-brother, were surveyors for the state, and one summer they took on a crew of geology students from the University of Utah, young and green and full of book learning, and you know how that sits with a man like Quinby. He got the idea of fooling them about how fast this country wears away. So one evening in a canyon near here he leans on the buckboard and says to that crew, "My how it erodes down here." He lets it sit. Then he turns to John R. and says, "Isn't this the place we were at this time last year?" And that's all he says. After dark, with the camp asleep, the two of them take ropes and hammers and chisels and slip off to a sheer rock face about fifty feet high. Now you want to appreciate what a grown man will do for a joke. From the top John lowers Quinby over the edge, and there he hangs in a rope chair in the night, chiseling their names, with last year's date, in "good engineering letters" two feet high. Next day they're all at work in that canyon and Quinby says, "I think we were standing about here when we carved our names in some rock face." He points. There they are, way up the wall. He mentions, easy as you please, that he'd done it standing on a wagon. Work that out. That comes to about forty feet of erosion in a year. The wagon was the master stroke, because people really did that. Travelers stood on their wagons to cut their names above the flood line, likely hoping they'd last for centuries. A hiker's reading gives that wall six names and the date September of nineteen eleven, and the park puts the Stewarts here in nineteen twelve, so if the story's true, the date's the lie. The family's telling quits about there, with the crew carrying the news to their professors, and a hope that some kind soul set them straight. I'd have paid good money to sit in that classroom and watch a young fellow in a clean collar put up his hand.