Stan Jones will long be known for mapmaking

I was informed last week that Stan Jones passed away. Cancer.

I'm sure the question most people would be asking about now is who the heck is Stan Jones?

Stan Jones produced the long-used Lake Powell "Boating and Exploring Map."

Jones is responsible for keeping millions of people on a straight and sometimes narrow course on Lake Powell. Who knows how many people would have made a wrong turn and ended up who knows where had it not been for his map.

Jones had whole folders full of letters from people thanking him for his map, many of them telling how they had been lost or stranded and how the map led them back to safety.

I interviewed him three years ago and found him to be, as I expected, a true adventurer. He hiked and boated and drove to places not seen in centuries, and then put those places to paper.

Jones was a self-taught mapmaker and a natural explorer. From the very day they started to fill the lake, he knew it would be a natural draw and that people would embrace the lake.

He made the first map of the lake back in 1967, pinpointing each canyon he'd explored, each ruin he'd discovered, each natural arch he'd seen.

To make the map, the told me, he bought a 14-foot aluminum boat, fixed a 15-horsepower motor to the rear and set off, albeit slowly, on his adventures. He would be gone, he recalled, "Anywhere from a few days up to three weeks. I think that was the longest trip."

I could not then, and more so now, even imaging tackling Lake Powell in a 14-foot aluminum boat and a 15-horsepower outboard motor.

I've hit rough water in an 18-foot runabout with a 150-horsepower motor and wished I had a bigger boat and more horses.

He told me he took the small boat into every canyon on the lake, mapping each bend and fork along the way. Once he would hit dry land, he would tie up the boat and hike.

He said if it was marked on the map, then it was a place he'd been and mapped, (and we're talking hundreds of arches, petroglyph site, ruins, water caves and roughly 96 major canyons).

I often wondered how he protected his work from copycat map makers. He did it by naming a few landmarks himself. One was "Carrot Top Arch."

"I knew after I did my map it would be plagiarized. If I ever had to go to court I could always ask how they got the name 'Carrot Top Arch.' I named it after my wife. She was a redhead," he said. And yes, his map was plagiarized, and no, he never sued.

He fought high winds, 10-foot waves, thick sheets of ice, driving rain and scalding temperatures over the years, "and I've loved every minute. I've had so much fun, and when you can make a living having fun, what better life can you have?"

He told me, however, that it bothered him that people were coming to the lake and weren't really looking at the pristine beauty anymore. They were in too much of a hurry to take the time to really look at the lake.

In more recent years he opted for retirement and transferred ownership of the mapping rights to Steve Ward, who, next to Jones, knows as much about the Glen Canyon landscape as anyone.

As I left, he told me: "It's my lake ... . It's my map, and all I ever wanted to do was show people just how spectacular and wonderful it is." And he did just that.