My son Josh was 16 in 1989 when we hiked as a family 18 miles down Death Hollow in southern Utah. We started out from Hell’s Backbone and worked our way down through Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, eventually reaching the Escalante River. This took five days, while the land around us morphed from a dry, shallow channel to a progressively deeper, wetter, and narrower canyon. We saw almost no other people. The shocker was arriving, on the last day, at the confluence with the Escalante River. It stunk. Weeds dominated. The water was fouled green and, as if out of central casting, a dead cow lay with its legs in the air. This cattle cafeteria, water trough, and bathroom was the Escalante River as managed by the BLM...