Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

 What can you say about a place like the Grand Canyon? It's probably the most famous of the 7 wonders of the natural world, but no description, pictures or documentaries can prepare you for the present feeling of looking down into it from one of the inner or outer rims. Most people feel a spirituality there and that is the only way that I can describe the profound dignity of the place. It rests there, serene, immobile, inviolate. Weather happens around it but does not affect it. It breathes in and out the days to mark time, but even that is of no consequence to it. As you stare down into the labyrinth of canyons and across to its banded walls that fall from the perfectly horizontal plateau you wonder how it was formed and then what it is that you can feel as you look down there, you feel a presence that will share the answer to the question of why. I was filled with an urge to scurry down into it, to become immersed in its crowding geology, to imbibe the details of the place and to luxuriate in its calm serenity. At the front of this urge is the desire to quell the how questions that pop up in every vista, but at base it is an urge to associate with the spiritual whole of the place. It is only through this language of spirituality that it is possible to rest down there and to get your arms around the presence that you sense when looking at the Grand Canyon. The objective explanations are patently inadequate. Yes, a river bored away at the rocks and caused rock-falls that widened the canyon over time immemorial, opposing forces working against each other endlessly and all the time gravity proving the victor and pulling the rivers closer and closer to the centre. I can see the processes and can imagine, with a leap of faith and multiplying out over millions of years that a river could do all this. But on such a scale? One river? Why? Why such grandeur, such beauty? Why carve out slender buttes and massive pinnacles and sheer cliffs of such startlingly different colours? The yearning to understand the motive for all this work is parallel to the quest for spirituality. And most importantly, there is no answer. That's the heart of the lesson.



 History

There are pictographs in the Grand Canyon that are 4,000 years old, believed to be drawn by a people called the Desert Archaics. These guys were succeeded by the Ancestral Puebloans by about 800 AD, which is about the time that the cities in Messa Verda were being built. In fact, there are ruins of adobe buildings in the canyon, including some at Phantom Ranch, which are believed to be from these Ancestral Puebloans. Many Native American tribes occupy lands in and around the canyon, including the Paiute, Navajo, Havasupai and Hualapai. Although Spanish explorers and Mormon settlers reached the Grand Canyon, it wasn't explored by Europeans until John Wesley Powell ran the Colorado all the way through the canyon in 1869. He ran the canyon again in 1872 accompanied by a photographer and an artist. This expedition generated lots of interest and by 1901 the Santa Fe Railway had built a spur line to Grand Canyon Village on the south rim. You can still ride this train to the south rim from Flagstaff. Tourism competed with mining and farming in the early years, and the declaration of the area as a national park in 1919 was bitterly opposed and blocked for 11 years. Probably the staunchest opponent of the national park, Ralph Cameron, made thousands of bogus mining claims across much of the south rim in order to secure trailheads and other tourist facilities in the area. He boasted that he would make more money out of the Grand Canyon than any other man. He launched litigation against the Federal Government alleging that the declaration of the national park was unconstitutional, was elected to the Senate in 1920 and managed to hold onto his mining claims into the 1930s. Today you can access the national park from the south rim and north rim, and can also get into the canyon through the Hualapai reservation on the west rim and the Havasupai on the east rim.

Geology

The first thing that strikes you about the Grand Canyon is the geology. It is so bare and obvious here. This is the story for how it formed: around 1,500 million years ago a tectonic plate collided with the plate that North America sits on and slid under it. However, massive volcanic mountains siting on the plate that was sliding down collided with those on the top plate and melted, forming the Vishnu bedrock that is now at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We have no idea how geologists devised these theories, but thats what they tell us. Then the two tectonic plates reversed direction, and separated. Into the breach flowed lava, sediments (that have since been pressurized into shales) and limestone, in successive layers. These layers are called the Grand Canyon Supergroup, and as they were formed when the tectonic plates were moving apart, they are very fractured and tilted off the horizontal. That's the bottom third of the grand canyon. The rest of the canyon is made of sedimentary rocks that are still in the horizontal alignment that they were formed on, at and near the ancient coastline. Massive amounts of shells and bones form layers of limestone, silty muds from river deltas form mudstone layers, fine sands from sand dunes solidified into huge sandstone bands.

Then came the event which makes Grand Canyon special. The Rocky Mountains began to form when the North American plate rode over the Pacific plate (different plates this time but same idea). However, instead of lifting the sediment layers up unevenly like they are in the rest of the Rockies, in an area that is now roughly the four corners (intersection of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico) they were lifted up evenly so that the layers remained horizontal. This is the Colorado Plateau that we've mentioned often before.

Finally, the Colorado River starts flowing across this plateau. Interestingly, when it started to run it flowed over huge layers of ash from the coastal volcanoes like Mt Rainier, Mt St Helen, Mt Hood, so that initially it was actually flowing above the peaks of many of the mountains that now surround it. Accordingly, the Colorado River's flow doesn't follow today's topography at all points, and at times cuts right through mountains instead of going around them. Anyway, when it got to the Colorado Plateau, the river cut into the horizontal sedimentary rock evenly. The different erosion rates of the river on these layers means that the harder layers are undermined as the river spreads out into the softer layer beneath it. The hard rock then collapses to form a cliff, and the debris from the collapse lie over the soft mud layer, protecting it from further erosion and forcing the river down instead of out wider.

This cliffs and slopes profile is apparent everywhere in the Grand Canyon, and is made possible by the horizontal alignment of the sedimentary rock. If the layers were slanted, the river would flow over the hard rocks and into the soft rocks, rather than cutting down into the harder rocks. The last thing to note is that because the rocks are sedimentary ones they erode relatively quickly into silt. This heavy silt content helps the river to erode the rock layers below. This process has been changed somewhat by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam. The reservoir caused by the dam causes the silt to drop out of the water and the river has 90% less silt below the reservoir than above it.

Ribbon Falls

What We Did

You can walk along the rim of the canyon, but most of the walks are into the middle. We went from the North Rim, mostly because it was closer than the South Rim, but also because it is far less popular and so we'd have a better chance of getting one of the precious back-country permits that allow you to camp below the rim. The North Rim is also higher than the South Rim and shuts down in winter because of snow. We arrived during a snow storm, and the night-time temperatures on the rim was to predicted to be 14 degrees Fahrenheit that night. So naturally we were pretty keen to get going as the temperatures below the rim are significantly higher (mid-twenties above the inner rim and mid-thirties at the bottom).

Fortunately we got one of the rangers with a can-do attitude, and although we had a seven mile walk and it was 2.30pm (3 hours til dark) he was confident we could make it. So we packed hurriedly and set off on our walk. We were undertaking three nights in the canyon – one at Cottonwood Campground, about 4,000 ft below the rim and nine miles from the Colorado River, one at Bright Angel Campground next to the Colorado River, and the third back at Cottonwood before the big hike back up to the North Rim. We thought this was a pretty decent effort and were prepared for some tough times. We had read that some people do the rim-to-rim walk in a day, so we knew that we weren't world-beaters, but nonetheless, respectable. This illusion was shattered on the last day as we were hiking up out of the canyon. Around 10am we were passed by a group of very fit-looking fellas (and a sheila), one of whom told us that they were doing a rim-to-rim-to-rim run. This is a 48-mile slog with 10,000 ft of vertical separation. What did we learn? You shouldn't compare. There will always be someone harder, stronger and more crazy than you. Always.

On the way down to Cottonwood we passed Roaring Falls, which is a spring that gushes from the middle of a cliff. This spring provides the entire water supply for the Grand Canyon National Park and feeds Bright Angel Creek, along which we walked the next day to its confluence with the Colorado. The ranger at the bottom of the canyon told us that the source of the spring is unknown, although it is thought to be “fossil water”. Fossil water is groundwater that has been trapped in an aquifer for a long period of time because changing geology in the area seals it off from being replenished. It's a very clear water when it flows down Bright Angel Creek and tastes beautiful.

Cottonwood Campground is surrounded by a lovely grove of old Cottonwood trees that were planted by early settlers who ran cattle in the canyon and built the path up to the North Rim. This path is very steep and is often cut into the side of a cliff but because it was built for livestock it is quite wide and very well made. We arrived at the campground shortly after sunset and heated up the leftover spaghetti bolognese that we'd cooked at Zion and been dreaming about all the way down. It lived up to expectations and we went to bed tired, full and happy.

Next day was a pleasant walk down the Bright Angel Canyon to Phantom Ranch, which is a tourist ranch that has a canteen, cabins, ranger station and mule corals. The ranch was originally designed as a dude ranch by Mary Colter and built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. (CCC) in the 1930s. The CCC was created during the Great Depression to give work to the legion of unemployed young men. Most of the trails, roads, bridges and lodges in the national parks that we've visited were constructed during the 1930s by the CCC. Today Phantom Ranch is run by a concessionaire (Xanterra), but it still looks like a dude ranch. One of the services that Phantom Ranch offers is to haul your bags on the mule trains that head to the South Rim and back every day (I think you can even ride these mules). These mules are the only means of transporting goods in and out of phantom ranch, and they're an integral part of the Grand Canyon experience. The people who work at the ranch have to walk in and out if they want to spend their days off away from the ranch. The cashier at the canteen told us that he'd been working there for a year and been out of the canyon only three times. He told us he was “at rock bottom and lovin' it!” - we didn't doubt him.

The Bright Angel Campground is next to the ranch and lots of people camping there eat at the cafeteria and attend the ranger presentations that are given twice a day. Different presentations are given each day, mostly on the local fauna and flora, history and geology. While we were there they were conducting a program to eliminate the brown trout from Bright Angel Creek and the Colorado River. The brown trout is an introduced species that is out-competing native fish, including the endangered Humpback Chub, which is found only in the Colorado River. They'd constructed a fish weir at the creek to trap these brown trout. The Havasupai tribe that agreed to allow this fish trap to be built insisted on the condition that all fish that were caught in the trap must be consumed. So you can get yourself a free feed of trouts at Bright Angel Campground if you're happy to cook them.

The main part of the Grand Canyon walk is the hike out. It hangs over you all the way down and while you're on the bottom. It is probably the subject of nervous questions on every ranger presentation (was for ours) and the yardstick by which all other days on the walk are measured. We had been planning our water and food the whole time so we'd have the lightest packs possible without taking undue risk. The key is to start early and drink lots of water. We thought we were up early but half of the camp had left as we walked out at 9am. Because we were so focused on the walk it was actually easier than anticipated. It's easier on the joints than walking down, but the pack starts to feel very heavy towards lunch time. It was also on the walk out that we were passed by the rim-to-rim-to-rim'ers and so our suffering paled next to theirs. If you have the presence of mind to look up from under your pack as you go, this walk is amazing. You're walking forward in geological time through the successive layers of sediments. Signs beside the trail at the meeting of these layers tell you about the formation of the rocks and which fossils you should be looking out for. In truth, though, this distraction wears out pretty soon and for the last few layers you're just yearning for the top.

Once the top is reached and the pack is dumped, the aches and discomforts which saturated your consciousness on the way up melt under the warm wash of liberation and accomplishment. We rode this feeling to the visitor center and lodge. Unfortunately the lodge was closed for the season so we had to wait for that massive first meal that always bookends a good hike. However, the view from the lodge was not closed, and because it was snowing on our way down, we hadn't seen the canyon from the north rim before. It is an incredible situation for a lodge (apparently it books out on the day reservations open, 13 months in advance), right on the rim of the canyon, on a butte that sticks out between the Bright Angel Canyon – which we walked up – and the Transect Canyon. We took the trail to Bright Angel Point (another trail with a lot of exposure), which is right at the end of the butte. It feels like you're on the prow of a massive ship steaming through the huge open spaces that dominate the grand canyon. You can see the entire trail that we'd walked for four days, the south rim, the San Franciscan Peaks near Albuquerque, a lone peak in the Navajo Nation called Humphreys Peak and surrounding you everywhere is the confounding, majestic symmetry of the Grand Canyon.