Ken Sleight at the Millennium
For Seldom Seen, Tilting Windmills Has always Been a Way of Life
By Jim Stiles
But
he was faking it. He may have looked like manager material to the big
shots at Firestone, but Sleight’s destiny had already been sealed four
years earlier, even if Ken didn’t fully know it yet. In the summer of
1951, just before his induction into the army, Ken took a foat trip
through Lodore Canyon on the Green River. With him on the boat was
Blaine Buzenbark, a nephew of the great river runner Bert Loper, and
Jim Dean, who had rafed with Loper before his death in the Grand Canyon
in 1949.
The
experience on the water was like nothing Ken had ever known. And as the
current carried them downstream, he and his friends spoke of a special
place that Ken had never seen---a place called Glen Canyon on the
Colorado River.
EDITOR’S
NOTE: I penned this piece about my dear friend Ken Sleight more than a
decade ago. We’ve all grown older since then--more cynical perhaps, but
hopefully wiser. This is how life was playing with Ken at the turn of
the century; for an update, see the postscript at the end of this story
and Take it or Leave It on page 2....JS
So
here’s the way it is with Ken Sleight. On Saturday evening Ken arrives
home at his beloved Pack Creek Ranch afer a fve day pack trip into the
depths of Dark Canyon with a bunch of greenhorn tourists from back
east. It’s been a grueling week. One of the paying guests walked of the
edge of a clif and shattered his arm and Ken and the rest of the group
spent part of a day carrying the
From
that moment Sleight was determined to go there and be a part of it. In
1955 Ken bought three rubber boats for $50 each and began taking
private trips through Desolation Canyon and, for the frst time--the
frst of many times--into Glen Canyon. Although the Firestone people
hadn’t been told, this place, he knew with absolute conviction, would
be the soulful center of his life. He could already imagine no other.
He
spent weeks on the Green and Colorado, learning the trade of river
running. “I never worked for another outft. I learned by trial and
error until I thought I was ready to hang my shingle.” He started
taking Boy Scouts down Glen in the summer of 1955 and in 1957, Ken
Sleight’s “Wonderland Expeditions” went fulltime. He quit selling tires
forever.
groaning
man to a pickup point and a waiting ambulance. “I wish he hadn’t done
that,” Sleight says, shaking his head. “I don’t really even know how he
did it.”
On
Sunday, he leads another small cluster of German Cowboy Wannabees on an
evening ride into the pines above the ranch. It is a beautiful sunset
and the guests are seeing country they had once only dreamed could
exist. One of the men on horseback shouts something to Ken who is
riding in the lead. The man looks distressed, but Ken just grins and
keeps going. They all arrive back at the stables in one piece and the
Germans head for the dining room. Ken grabs a bag of tortilla chips, a
jar of salsa, and a beer, setles down in front of his computer and
calls me on the phone.
“Stiles! This is Ken.”
“Ken
where are you? How’s your story coming along?” I ask. His next column
for the Zephyr is due on Monday and I haven’t heard from him all week.
“I’m
working on it right now; it’s about the waste dump in Blanding,” he
explains. “I should have it fnished by morning. If it’s okay I’ll just
leave the disk in the usual place on the porch.”
“Sounds good. What time are you coming by? Maybe we can get cofee.”
“Oh...sometime around three or four.”
“What? Three in the morning? Again?”
“Yeah...I’ve got to be in Salt Lake by ten. I’m going to a meeting on draining Lake Foul.”
“Okay...but when are you going to sleep?”
“I’ll sleep later.”
Ken Sleight will be 70 years old on August 16.
Ken (Seldom Seen) Sleight.
The
next seven years were in many ways the most idyllic and beautiful times
of Ken’s life. Year afer year he foated Glen Canyon, taking hundreds
of passengers along at thirty-fve bucks a piece for a week’s worth of
adventure and indescribable loveliness. “I ran about 15 trips a year.
In those days we just loaded everybody in an open pickup truck and
hauled them down to the river. Of course none of the roads were paved
back then. The road from Hanksville to Hite was always...in-teresting.
“We
launched from the old Hite Ferry. We didn’t need permits...we just
went. But then there weren’t too many people on the river in 1956
either.”
There was hardly anyone on the river in the 1950s. Glen Canyon was one of the most remote
places
in the continental United States. It “belonged” to a handful of
original river runners who shared a special love for the river and for
each other. They were a family--Harry Aleson, Al Quist, Moki Mac
Ellingson, Buzz Hatch, Jim Dean, Blaine Buzenbark, Katie Lee...Ken. The
river was quiet. There was no scramble for campsites. When they met up
on the river, they threw their groups together. The Family could have
gone on like this forever. But like a bad memory that sits in the back
of your brain and refuses to leave, even on the most glorious of days,
the very sight of those magnifcent tapestried sandstone walls could
cause a dull ache in Sleight’s heart. There was not a moment during
those seven blissful years on Glen that Ken could gaze at the
shimmering river and forget it was doomed.
That
is the way it is with Ken Sleight. It’s the way Ken has always been .
He has tilted more windmills than Don Quixote could assault in ten
lifetimes. He never gives up. Hell...he never stops moving. And he
rarely loses his sense of humor along the way. Ken Sleight truly takes
a licking and keeps on ticking.
His passion for the canyons and mesas and mountains and desert skies of
That is the way it is with Ken Sleight.
It’s the way Ken has always been...
He has tilted more windmills than Don Quixote
could assault in ten lifetimes..
Ken Sleight truly takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Downstream, 150 from Hite, construction of Glen Canyon Dam began in 1956.
The experience on the water was like nothing
Ken had ever known.
And as the current carried them downstream,
he and his friends spoke of a special place
that Ken had never seen---
a place called Glen Canyon...
southern
Utah is unquestionable; his devotion to protecting those wild places,
unshakable. You might think by now, afer decades of fghting government
bureaucrats, close-minded conservative rural Utah politicians and
bickering cross-purposed environmentalists, he might just throw up his
arms and give up. Just turn the sword over to someone else. But Sleight
is not ready to relinquish the sabre yet...not yet.
Ken
was hardly raised in a radical environment. He grew up Mormon in
conservative Bear Lake, Idaho near the Utah border. He served two
years in the army and saw combat in Korea with the 48th Field Artillery
Batalion. When he was discharged from the service, he returned to the
West, graduated from the University of Utah in 1955, got married and
took a job with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in the accounting
department. Ken showed such promise, Firestone sent him to Logan as a
Manager/Trainee. He wore a bow tie almost every day.
When
completed, the 700 foot concrete dam would block the fow of the river
and a reservoir, Lake Powell, would rise behind it. The dam was
insanity. Uter madness. And the work proceeded with methodical
precision.
“For
a long time, I just didn’t think it would happen. I was young and it
didn’t sink in. A few of us organized against the dam and called
ourselves Friends of Glen Canyon. But it was too late.”
In
the spring of 1963, the twenty ton steel gate on the west diversion
tunnel was closed and the fow of the Colorado River was choked down to
a trickle. The river in Glen Canyon began to die.
“It was probably foolish and masochistic of me to have hung around and