By Gary Topping–
“Hey Eric, what’s the weather going to be”?
“The weather will be with us.”
Eric Bayles’s concise cowboy wisdom proved to be true: the weather was indeed with us. Oh boy, was it ever! I was never so cold in my life. And I was never so happy.
During the early 1980s I began a research project that eventually became a book, Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country. It involved a lot of archival research, of course, and in that I received invaluable assistance from several friends who were better travelers than I. While I worked the repositories in Utah and Arizona, they covered others ranging from New York City to Honolulu. It was a great deal of fun.
The best part of it, though, was the field research into the San Juan Triangle, the vast region between the Colorado River through Glen Canyon and the San Juan River from New Mexico though Colorado into Utah. Several friends joined me for large parts of that, too, but my main tutelage came from the old Glen Canyon riverman Dick Sprang. Dick was an artist who, beginning in the early 1940s, had made his living drawing Batman comic books. Each fall, he and his wife would spend from one month to six weeks in their boat, “living in Glen Canyon,” as he put it. He came to know the canyon intimately and he was generous in sharing his knowledge with me. Every October we would meet at the Halls Crossing marina where we would spend a week in one of the rental mobile homes (always Unit #108—they should put a plaque on it) from which I would venture forth during the days to explore some canyon or mesa of historical importance. Dick’s hiking days were over, but he would drop me off at one place and pick me up at another. Our evenings were taken up with the onerous task of drinking huge amounts of liquor and watching his thousands of Kodachrome slides of Glen Canyon in the old river days.
One day in 1987, after dropping me off for an overnight hike, Dick encountered Eric Bayles, cow boss of the Lazy TY outfit headquartered at Irish Green Spring. They hit if off immediately, and when Dick picked me up the next day, he said, “I’ve got a guy you need to meet.” Dick knew the river, but Eric knew the tributary canyons and the plateau country out on top. The completion of my education would be in his hands. When I met Eric the next day, we also hit it off. I’ve never seen another case where total strangers instantly became best friends. I don’t think we had talked for more than fifteen minutes before he invited me to join him the following January for one of their regular winter rides. I was going to be a cowboy!
The Lazy TY is not a ranch; it is simply a BLM grazing allotment. It covers the entire vast area from the Bears Ears on Elk Ridge to the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado Rivers. The midwinter rides are to find any cattle who might have gotten themselves isolated in some canyon where they are eating up all the vegetation and starving to death. In such a case, the cowboys drive them out and into some other place where they can find fresh grazing. I joined them for two of those week-long January rides, in 1988 and 1989. I had the time of my life.
Eric was born in Moab, but grew up in Blanding where he worked first for his father, a sheep man, then as a cowboy. He grew up in the saddle with a rope in his hands. At one point he decided to leave and got a construction job somewhere in the area. But one day, in a particularly blue moment, he looked up and saw the Bears Ears. He quit his job, went back to cowboying, and has been doing it since.
Eric is the antithesis of the laconic Gary Cooper-type cowboy. We would trot along together, talking endlessly and laughing like crazy. We talked about marriage, divorce, drinking (he is a recovering alcoholic), politics, and of course history. I had hardly ever been on a horse before, but I learned to ride. The first day we made nineteen miles, and when I slid out of the saddle my legs simply would not work. All I could do was hang onto the saddle horn and stand still until I felt some function returning. That first trip there were four of us—Eric and I and two young Navajo cowboys Eric had hired in Mexican Hat—and eight horses. We rode four of the horses and used the others as pack animals. I learned to throw a diamond hitch in Eric’s unique way and to cook in his two twelve-inch dutch ovens. Some of the steep trails down those canyon walls were truly scary, but those TY horses handled them like mountain goats. We never had to put a rein to them; they knew exactly where to go. To Eric’s immense amusement, I told him he would always be able to tell which saddle I was riding because my fingerprints were deeply embedded in the saddle horn!
These are my January memories. The weather was with us, and omigod was it ever cold! But it was the best time of my life.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
