Red Hole in Time

Escalante Canyon is a red-walled hole in a geologic uplift (the Uncompahgre Plateau) in western Colorado. Pioneers surging west fell into this canyon hole the way gold nuggets get caught in the potholes of a stream. Like nuggets eddying against stone they were shaped by the Canyon—rounded off shattered or tossed away according to how they conformed or resisted. Indeed treasure richer than gold settled into that hole in time; in the onrushing current of history the lifestyle—the Old West—settled and still survives there—in fact in artifact and in living memories.The tale of the canyon is a tale of struggle change frontier friendship and enmity that is part of the story of the West itself: Anglo settlement; conflict between cowman nester and sheep man; epidemics; hardships; loneliness. Many of its stories though are tantalizing episodes unique to this place laced with oddity and tragedy.Using as digging tools the camera tape recorder diaries memoirs and a hundred years of old newspapers Marshall has mined more gold than the first prospectors ever suspected lay in that mysterious red hole.