The Canyon is 270 miles long. Was all this erosion due to the Colorado River? Presumably not, as there are other rivers and other environmental factors that play a role. How long does it take to wear away a mountain? The mind cannot take it all in. It is simply too vast to imagine. I was overcome with a sense of mankind’s littleness, of the transience of human life, of my own pitiable mortality, in the contemplation of such silent magnificence. I was overcome with fear of falling into the abyss below. I could not walk on the peninsulas of rock that jut out from time to time near Mather Point on the South Rim, even though there were railings on both sides, and solid rock beneath my feet, because there is a vertigo-inducing empty space on all three sides. Many visitors were, I thought, quite foolishly going right out to the end with nothing but hope to keep them safe and upright, to mug clownishly for the camera. A book on sale at the Visitor Centre records that more than 600 people have died over the years since records have been kept, dead from heatstroke, cardiac arrest, or falling off the edge. There are some among the latter, the book reports, who have been victims of suicide and murder.
We walked more than three miles along the rim until dark clouds forced us to retrace our steps before taking a shuttle bus, as no cars are allowed along this very narrow eight-mile stretch along the western end of the South Rim road where bus drivers are careful to keep to the 30 m.p.h. limit, as in places where they are forced to come perilously close to the edge. Spectacular views of the Canyon in all of its colourful glory were afforded us at each of a number of stops along the route. We got off at one where there was a memorial to Colonel John Wesley Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War, and a geologist and explorer who charted the Colorado River by travelling by canoe through the Canyon in 1869 and 1872. His thrilling memoir of his adventures can be found in his account of these expeditions, ‘The Explorations of the Colorado River and its Canyons,’ published in 1895. Powell coined the name of the Grand Canyon itself. The name of the river, ‘Colorado,’ is Spanish for ‘coloured,’ a word most apt to describe the changes of light, from grey to blue or purple, to yellow or orange or red, and back to grey, on all of the rock formations of the Canyon, in storm and sunlight over hundreds of thousands of years of change.
We were forced to abandon our sightseeing by a powerful rainstorm, and could not continue our shuttle bus tour to the Kaibab (eastern end) of its run. By the time the bus was forced to stop, we could no longer see across the Canyon at all, but made up for this disappointment at the National Geographic Visitor Centre at the Park entrance, where we paid to see the IMAX film of the Canyon, which was similarly awe-inspiring, and before leaving bought a DVD copy of the film for ourselves. I have recently read that Google Earth now makes it possible to “fly virtually” over the Canyon itself. I hope I was not wrong in suggesting that nothing can substitute with actually “being there.” Virtual technology, we must remember, relies heavily on deception, and the Canyon, thankfully, is the real thing.
Our trip to the Canyon was completed days later by a less dramatic sight of it from the North Rim, followed by a visit to nearby Monument Valley with its strange red sandstone ‘buttes,’ many appearing to have been carved by human hands, among them Owl Rock, which looked like a representation of the Virgin Mary from one angle, and the profile of a Navajo warrior’s face from another. An impressively craggy rock formation, apparently volcanic in origin, was one called ‘Burnt Foot Butte,’ our guide book told us. Our Arizona visit was so interesting that we resolved to come back the next summer to see more, which we did, and were once again awestruck, even smitten, by such unfamiliar, almost unearthly landscapes.
