came from a Scoutmaster who told me, “I don’t even take
boys on hikes that long until they were well into their teens.
What are you thinking taking two girls?”
He was sure my son would be fine, but my girls?
In true Edward Abbey fashion, all I could think was that he
wished for our trails to be “crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous
leading [us] to the most amazing view[s].”
And so, we went despite my uneasiness.
Truth be told, those naysayers had weaseled their way into
my head. Sure, I had purchased the best hiking boots and gear
money could buy and we carried more water than we could
drink on that journey, but it was hot, dry, and I was way out
of my comfort zone. The rest of my family - my cousins and
aunts - had walked ahead of us and now, as dusk slowly made
her way into the canyon, shadows from the smallest pebble or
bush appeared high up on the canyon walls -walls taller than
the Empire State Building- a realization that it was just me,
my three children, and the canyon. The Grand Canyon.
Now, decades later, I find myself on a bench just outside
the back doors of the Visitors Center at the
North Rim. The blistering sun feels hot on my skin
and beads of sweat trickle down my spine. Leaning back in
my chair I rest my feet on the stone wall built by members of
the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1933, a huge undertaking.
On the South Rim, if you look closely at the wall
you will find a stone, shaped like a heart, installed by a CCC
worker in 1935 for his Harvey Girl Sweetheart (a hotel waitress).
Legend says they were married in that very spot a few
years later. Pondering this love story, I took a drink from
my water bottle and then raised the bottle over my head and
poured it down my back, sending chills down my spine leaving
me refreshed from my day hike along the edge of the canyon
rim.
As I sat there staring into the abyss of the grandest canyon
in the world the air seemed to once again soften with clouds
tumbling in from the distance and in this rare weather phenomena,
fog began to fill the canyon stopping just shy of the
rim’s edge. The clouds, fluffy and frothy in appearance gave
us the illusion that we could simply walk across them to the
other side of the canyon.
Air temperatures typically cool as it moves higher into the
Earth's atmosphere, yet during one of these rare inversion
events, “a layer of warm air traps cool air and moisture closer
to the ground, preventing it from dissipating as it normally
would, resulting in a total cloud inversion. It is said to be such
a rarity that most people don’t ever see it in their lifetime. I
walked back inside the visitor’s center past the bronze statue
of Brighty - a most legendary burro - stroking his nose for
luck and turned the corner into the restaurant where I stopped
in my tracks.
That moment hung in the air much like the fog in the canyon and
I recalled my first trip to the Grand Canyon where I sat in the chair
at the corner table by the window as a child, staring into the canyon
when suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly, the clouds rolled and
tumbled into the canyon filling it with marshmallow clouds.
My mother seemed giddy at the moment, my dad took photos,
and then we just sat together staring out the window, sipping our hot
chocolate. I didn’t realize it at the time what a rare event I was privy
to see; neither did my parents but it was one of those moments where
the canyon etched itself into your memory, never to be forgotten.
John Wesley Powell said, “You cannot see the Grand Canyon in
one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain
might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month
through its labyrinths.”
Even then you may not fully see it at all. For it is rare, wild, and
much of it untouched. Unexplored even. For it is the Grand Canyon.
Fully wild and in the words of Wallace Stegner, “We simply
need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than
drive to its edge and look in.”
32 Gateway to Canyon Country
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