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July 18 - August 22, 2024
So many horrible things happened to us down there, I point out, that it’s almost impossible to single out just one because, really, any of them could have qualified as the most wretched and intolerable of all. There was, for example, the afternoon I tripped and fell into a cactus, and the night that I unwittingly unfurled my sleeping bag atop an anthill—which happened to be the very same evening that Pete and I toppled into the Colorado River with our backpacks. Or the morning after the snowstorm when I was trying to thaw out my frozen shoes with our camp stove, and accidentally set them on
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The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon’s rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath. But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your
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as he strolled toward the rim, Fletcher, who had already seen plenty of postcards and magazines with images of the canyon, thought he knew what awaited him. But none of that even came close to preparing him for what it actually felt like to step to the brink of the chasm and peer inside.
Each square inch of stone was saturated in the lustrous tones—almond and rose, chestnut and salmon, chocolate and peach, coffee and eggplant and plum—of rock that had been left to marinate and mellow in the urn of time. There were shadows, too: a limitless array, each extending at precisely the same distance in proportion to the height of its source, each pointing in exactly the same direction, suffusing the core of the chasm with texture and reach and dimensionality.
No other river in America was more rigorously controlled or more stringently regulated—and none had been exploited so ruthlessly that, according to one set of calculations, every drop of its water was used and reused up to seventeen times before the Colorado dried up and died in the Sonoran Desert south of the border. In effect, the river that had carved the Grand Canyon was no longer nature as much as plumbing—a system so efficient that even in the wettest years, not so much as a teaspoon of its waters was permitted to reach the sea.
in extricating ourselves from these self-generated predicaments, I learned a few things. I was forced to admit that thanks to my own shortcomings in the same areas that Pete found challenging, I often bore just as much blame as he did when the train came off the rails. I also recognized that he was far better than me when it came to not only getting us out of trouble, but also how to look at trouble in the first place. Even when nothing seemed to be going our way, he held fast to the belief that something absolutely marvelous lay hidden within the folds of each disaster, and that if we kept
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“Believe it or not,” he exclaimed, “you and I don’t even have to worry about being in shape.” That sounded odd. How could we pull off an expedition such as this without being in top physical condition? “Because,” Pete said, sensing my skepticism while warming to his revelation, “the hike itself is the thing that’s gonna get us in shape for the hike.” “Really?” I mumbled, struggling to wrap my head around the logic. “You bet. In fact, that’s the coolest part of the entire plan.”
Hahahahaha, oh no.
I knew that the organizing-and-testing business was important, and I had every aim of flinging myself into the mission, when the moment was right. But, alas, a hundred other urgent and pressing tasks intervened—laundry, napping, mowing the lawn—and despite my best intentions, the pile inside the garage continued to grow. Then, almost without warning it seemed, September 24 arrived, and it was time to leave for the canyon.
they had cast away everything except what mattered for their survival, attesting to how well they understood the difference between what they merely wanted, and what they’d actually need—a distinction whose drawing demanded a measure of ruthlessness.
While the colors of the strata above were dark and bold, the Redwall’s hues were subtle and delicate, a fusion of pastels—pink and vermilion, together with hints of peach and tangerine, coral and salmon—marking it as the one layer of the canyon that it’s possible to imagine Monet having painted.
the U.S. Army embarked on a scorched-earth campaign across the Navajo Nation, confiscating their sheep and horses, burning their homes, and cutting down every peach tree in their central sanctuary of Canyon de Chelly. When the holdouts were left with no choice but to surrender, virtually the entire tribe, more than eighty-five hundred people, was forced to march some four hundred miles to a desolate camp in eastern New Mexico, an exodus known as the Long Walk. More than two hundred died along the way, and hundreds more perished from disease and malnutrition once they arrived.
This was the Little Colorado River, where Powell and his crew had glimpsed the prehistoric trail. It is the largest tributary inside the canyon, a gorge that extends nearly sixty miles to the east before merging with the rim, and it drains almost twenty-seven thousand square miles of the Painted Desert, an area larger than Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut put together. When storms fill its branches with brown waves of sediment-rich floodwaters, its volume can rival that of the Colorado itself.
“The places that are most worth visiting—they’re never easy to get into or back out of, are they?” he said.
“In addition to its mysteries and its beauty,” he continued, “I think suffering is at the center of what it means to be in the canyon.”
deploy the mid
MICROspikes,
Along this section of the Tonto lie nearly a dozen of these springs, many of which, fittingly, are named after a semiprecious stone—Crystal, Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Emerald, Ruby, and Serpentine—no two of which are exactly alike.
“Do you wish your dad could have seen this?” asked Pete, who knew me well enough that he could sometimes read my thoughts. “Yeah.” “And are you feeling like you should have spent more time with him, and now it’s too late?” “Maybe.” “Do you feel guilty because you’re out here instead of back there with him?” “I think I like it better when we talk less,” I said. “How about we do that now?”
The color of that rock was deeply pleasing to the eye, a honeyed brown with a hint of toasted orange that suggested what might happen to sunlight if it were barreled and aged.
mindful of the lesson I’d learned the previous autumn about the importance of provenience after cluelessly spending the night in the field of potsherds near the Little Colorado,
Deep inside the vault, the air should have felt murky and dark. Instead, it was awash in a lustrous radiance, lit with a soft sheen that appeared to emanate from several different places at once. Although the sky itself had vanished, sunlight was still pouring into the top of the slot, and long, gleaming fingers of gold extended far down the walls, filling the interior with an effulgence so delicate, elusive, and gorgeous that we lowered our voices and spoke in whispers, as if we had stepped into a place of worship.
We followed the trail around the right side of the pool to a set of crude stairs hacked into the travertine that led up the cliff to the mouth of a tunnel. Inside the tunnel, which was originally excavated by a party of nineteenth-century lead and silver miners, the light faded and then disappeared, forcing us to fumble with our hands as we climbed through a series of steep twists and turns until we emerged at the top of the falls.
Directly beneath us, the ground fell away through the topmost layers of rock, plunging almost two thousand feet to the vast boulevard of the Esplanade. It extended as far to the east and west as the eye could see—bloodred in the dying light and neatly bisected by a thin, horizontal shadow delineating where the walls of the canyon’s inner gorge dropped to the hidden waters of the Colorado.
Starting in the 1920s, a small band of intrepid stockmen in search of open rangeland had drifted onto this part of the Arizona Strip with their families, and discovered that it offered an unusual opportunity to graze cattle inside the canyon. Each autumn, they drove their animals down a handful of tributaries to the broad benches of the Esplanade—which the ranchers called the Sandrock—then fenced off the routes back to the rim to prevent the stock from escaping.
During those weeks the routine remained the same, but other things began to change, especially our bodies. By now, the months of walking had whipped us into a level of fitness that neither of us had even approached in years. We were so accustomed to our packs that we no longer minded or even registered their weight and felt strangely naked without them, and we had the stamina to move without pause or strain from sunrise to sunset.
embodiments of the canyon itself. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this dirty before,” I remarked one afternoon. “Me, neither—I’ve never gone this long without a bath,” Pete said. “But what’s weird is that I don’t feel dirty. Is that crazy?” “Probably. But I feel the same way.”
Unlike the prehistoric petroglyphs we had already encountered along the Esplanade, these images had neither been etched nor pecked into the rock using stone tools. Instead, they belonged to an older genre of expression created by brushing the surface of the rock in colors obtained from plant or mineral dyes: black and white, green and blue, yellow and red. Known as polychrome pictographs—essentially stone paintings—they were gorgeous, vibrant, and far more detailed than their distant petroglyph cousins. The age of those images is believed to exceed four thousand years—roughly concurrent with
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By now we had ventured far beyond where even the faintest glimmer of artificial illumination crept into the sky from the hotels and gas stations on the South Rim, while the lights of Las Vegas were still too far to the west to register on the horizon. This left us enveloped in something singular, because aside from the deserts of eastern Oregon, the badlands of southern Utah, and a few isolated pockets in places such as Death Valley, no other part of the country can match the darkness that looms over this section of the canyon on a calm, moonless night just before the stars emerge.
Regardless of its source, that well of energy now triggered a kind of madness in the form of something that neither of us would have considered doing six months earlier. Late one afternoon, without bothering to discuss the matter, we cinched the shoulder straps on our packs, tightened our hip belts and chest harnesses, and started running.
Before setting off on a venture as risky and daring as this, a wiser and more experienced pair of hikers might well have paused to sniff the air and ask if it was possible to detect a trace of the cockiness and hubris for which they had already been thoroughly spanked. They might also have devoted a moment or two to dwell on the merits of being humble in the face of the powerful and mysterious forces they had just witnessed. And then maybe they would have thought about dialing it back a notch or two. But not us.
All around us, petals of every shape and size were popping up in patches of dirt: little pink mariposa lilies, golden desert dandelions, and tiny lavender clusters of storksbill. Soon they would be followed by purple four-o’clocks, lemon-colored fiddle-necks, and, most dramatic of all, the flaming-orange blossoms atop the twenty-foot-long branches of the ocotillo, a shrub whose early budding cycles have evolved to coincide with the peak arrival of at least four different species of hummingbird.
Just west of the Toroweap overlook, the terrain underwent a dramatic change, thanks to a chain of ancient volcanic eruptions that had taken place some eight hundred thousand years ago, which was practically the day before yesterday on the scale of geological time. On at least seventeen occasions, waves of lava had poured over the rim, streaming down the walls of the canyon and choking off the river.
I plunged directly onto a sturdy Barrel Cactus the size of a fire hydrant and broke my fall by driving dozens of its inch-long spines directly into my right forearm. The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back next to the base of the uprooted cactus and clutching my arm, which felt as if it had been shot through with a nail gun, while trying to stop the bleeding. Pete, who had heard the fall and raced back in my direction, initially thought I had suffered a compound fracture. After wiping off the blood with some swabs from our med kit, we agreed that it wasn’t quite as bad as it looked. The
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