A Big Canyon in Tiny Bits

It has become readily, exhaustingly apparent to me that I simply don't have time to do a long, in-depth, don't-post-it-until-the-fourth-or-fifth-draft entry about the trip to the Grand Canyon. Instead, I'm going to squeeze in small semi-edited bits here and there, and hopefully I'll get the major insights and experiences out in some course of time. (Stated goal: before Christmas).

Statistics demand that you probably can't say anything about the Grand Canyon that hasn't already been said, and you probably can't take a picture of it that hasn't already been taken. This fact, of course, fails to prevent you from sucking in photographs and spitting out verbiage, because the thing is just simply so damn big and so damn magnificent. I had the good fortune of visiting it once before, but only for a single day, eight years ago, as a waypoint between Indiana and California, and in a somewhat hurried and exhausting fashion. When I returned with my dad a few weeks ago, I was initially struck in exactly the same way as I had been on my first trip: My brain simply decided that what it was looking at was impossible, and therefore clearly had to be a two-dimensional movie backdrop. The majesty of the view is still deeply moving, but it is so large and so absurdly magnificent that initially, it feels flat and unreal:

And the more you look at it, the more it sort of wears at your brain with its beauty, which is a pretty wonderful thing to have wearing at your brain, because you can't stop looking at it in the same way there are days when you can't stop looking at the clouds in the sky. It demands attention.

My first look at the Canyon this trip came in the center of the South Rim village area, which is extremely well done for a heavily-tourist-infested national park. Nonetheless, some of the majesty is lost when you're staring out at this brilliant vista and your moment of peace is continually interrupted by Ray-Bob and Nadine and the rest of the Billyjack family posing for one million photos three feet away from you. This is not to say that I resent the Billyjacks or any of the other hoardes. Everyone should get a chance to see this big damn thing. It's just that it is, for me, in a deeply personal way, very important to get the hell away from them, and that is what Dad and I did, post-haste.

It had been mid-afternoon when we arrived at the park, and the light was starting to fade, so we took the shuttle bus eight miles west of the village area and started hiking back along the delightfully deserted rim trail. This is a fantastic introduction to the canyon, because as you walk next to it, it begins to gain depth and life, and the movie-backdrop effect wears off a bit. When you're hiking along a trail that is ten feet from a thousand-foot vertical drop, that third dimension is definitely in play:

Also wonderful is that despite what I'm sure were the efforts of literally thousands of lawyers, roughly 95% of this rim trail is unencumbered by a railing of any kind. It is good that there are places in the world where people are still allowed to interact with nature in a way that may kill them. Adding to the sense of depth brought about by such a palatable precipice, the sun grew low as we hiked, shifting many of the canyon's features into peaceful relief, which revealed another level of dimension and texture:

The shadows stretch, the layers of mist are illuminated and then released into the darkening pockets of rock, and you still can't stop looking, except now in an entirely different way, almost as though you were now standing before an entirely different object than the one that flattened itself across your mind a few hours previous. The rim trail alternately juts into and out of the canyon, so that at some points the view is relatively closed off by peninsulas on either side, and at other points, when you round one of those peninsulas, an entirely new and stunning view awaits you. The westward view of the previous photo is completely different than the eastward perspective waiting around the next turn:

At some point before the sun actually dipped below the canyon rim, we came to Hopi Point, the midway stop on the western shuttle bus route where the infesting hoardes come to watch the sun set. We stopped briefly to watch day's final departure, and then quickly hiked the heck out of there, back eastward to the next bus stop, which was much less populated. Even after jumping on a semi-crowded bus and riding back to the village area, even after a long day of travel and a fantastic if brief hike, even with hardly any light left at all in the sky, we still spent another twenty minutes just standing on the edge, watching it get dark. The sight of the canyon faded into the blackness, but its presence did not.

And then we grabbed some spaghetti and meatballs at a park restaurant (food quality: refreshingly adequate), drove two miles to our hotel in the tiny town of Tusayan (population: a handful of park employees, eight hotels, eight restaurants, one grocery store, one gas station offering fuel at $3.69 a gallon, one airport, and, no kidding, one IMAX theatre) and tucked in early to rest up for our big darn hike down into the canyon. A good first day.