Mount Dellenbaugh is an extinct volcano at the southern edge of the Arizona Strip whose summit preserves the last known trace of William Dunn and the Howland brothers, members of John Wesley Powell’s Grand Canyon expedition who disappeared in 1869. A name scratched into the summit’s basalt became the object of a modern family expedition: DeLoy Bateman climbed the mountain with relatives to find the inscription, which connects the vanished explorers’ story to the history DeLoy was trying to understand.

Setting and historical context

The mountain rises to 6,990 feet above a harsh, open landscape. During their journey out of the Grand Canyon, Dunn and the brothers Oramel Gass Howland and Seneca Howland climbed from the river through Separation Canyon to the north rim, then crossed the Shivwits Plateau. About thirty arduous miles from the river, they reached Mount Dellenbaugh to get their bearings and plan a route toward the Mormon settlements of southern Utah.

The three men had left the expedition after nearly a thousand perilous river miles. On August 27, near the lower end of the Grand Canyon, they announced their intention to climb roughly four thousand vertical feet and then cross more than a hundred miles of desert. Powell pleaded with them to stay, but they departed. The following day, they carried two rifles, a shotgun, a duplicate set of expedition papers, and a silver watch Jack Sumner had asked them to deliver to his sister if he drowned. After Dunn made his mark on the mountain, the trio presumably continued north. They never reappeared.

The inscription and the missing explorers

The inscription is scratched onto a flat-faced, brownish basalt boulder on the summit. Dunn carved his name, the date 1869, and an arrow pointing north toward the Utah line. The mark is modest against the mountain’s jagged crown, but its historical weight is exceptional: it is the last trace of Dunn and the Howlands known to exist.

Dunn was not yet thirty, and wore buckskin clothing described by his employer, Major John Wesley Powell, as having a dark, oily luster. He had been part of the expedition celebrated for its descent of the Grand Canyon. The inscription does not resolve what happened after the three men left the river; it establishes only that they reached the summit and indicates the direction they meant to take. That gap between a surviving mark and an unknown fate is what makes the mountain more than a waypoint in their journey.

DeLoy Bateman’s search

More than a century later, DeLoy Bateman organized a family camping trip around a climb to find Dunn’s signature, then described as 132 years old. The search also carried a family-historical question: DeLoy’s great-great-great-uncle had been involved in leading emigrants to John D. Lee’s trap during the Mountain Meadows massacre, and the inscription might help explain puzzling events in the massacre’s aftermath that could have involved DeLoy’s ancestors or their associates. DeLoy was interested in investigating that past rather than concealing it.

The climbing party included DeLoy, Randy Bateman, one of DeLoy’s two wives, and nine of his seventeen children. Four other children, a grandchild, and a son-in-law remained at base camp. Because the party included two six-year-old boys and two eight-year-old girls, the ascent proceeded slowly. The children stopped to look beneath rocks for snakes, examine desert plants, and identify geological specimens; DeLoy encouraged those stops as part of making outdoor trips opportunities to learn.

By the time the group reached the summit, sunset was only minutes away. The summit crater was crowded with enormous basalt blocks, any of which might have borne the inscription. Just before the remaining light disappeared, someone spotted the right boulder. DeLoy brushed his fingertips over the faint but unmistakable letters, then looked out from the summit toward the view Dunn would have seen more than a century earlier. The next morning, on the way back to Colorado City, the family passed a memorial to the lost members of Powell’s expedition, and DeLoy stopped to examine it. The mountain’s inscription had not solved the disappearance, but it had made a fragment of that history tangible—and brought DeLoy’s search for knowledge to the very place where the fragment survived.