Scott Thybony Commentaries

A stand of bear-clawed aspen trees on the San Francisco Peaks is the jumping off point for this month’s Canyon Commentary by Scott Thybony. It was the base camp of naturalist C. Hart Merriam in the late 1800’s. He was working on a groundbreaking project: studying the distribution patterns of plants and animals from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the top of Humphrey’s Peak. Merriam called them ‘Life Zones’, the boundaries which reflect climate and ecological variation in mountains, deserts, rivers and canyons. They are still used today to assess how ecosystems respond to a changing climate.

Some years back, KNAU commentator Scott Thybony took an assignment for a magazine article about Native American POWs from tribes of the Colorado Plateau. He interviewed WWII veteran Sam Antonio, an Acoma Indian, who lived through the Bataan Death March, Hell Ships and unimaginable torture by his captors. Antonio credited his survival to his Pueblo religion. In Scott Thybony's latest Canyon Commentary, he tells the story of their first meeting. The two remained friends until Sam's death two years ago. 

Commentator Scott Thybony was in northern Canada in 1972 when he realized he’d had enough of the freezing-cold and wanted to come home to the Southwest. Upon his return, he and his brother decided to live on the Navajo Nation with an elderly medicine man and his wife who needed some help tending their land. But not sharing a similar language, the adventure led to a funny miscommunication about food. Scott tells us the story in his latest Canyon Commentary.

Flagstaff astrogeologist Eugene Shoemaker played a key role in the early days of lunar exploration as a world-renowned expert on impact craters. But he also had a passion for rivers. Commentator Scott Thybony once took a trip with Shoemaker to Island in the Sky, a mesa within Canyonlands National Park. That’s where Shoemaker told him about swimming Lava Falls Rapid in the Grand Canyon on a trip to retrace John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Colorado River.  In Scott’s latest Canyon Commentary, he connects next week’s 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing with this year’s 150th anniversary of Powell’s historic river trip through the life and work of Eugene Shoemaker.