Last week in this space, Dear Reader, I mentioned my trip to the Grand Canyon. A pilgrimage, I called it. But in truth, I just wanted to visit a landmark, to cross an item off my bucket list.

Like everyone else, Your New Favorite Writer knew Grand Canyon from Disney films, National Geographic specials, and the like. But that is not the same as being there. I figured it was about time I joined the park’s visitor list.

I signed up for a week-long Road Scholar tour of the canyon’s North and South Rims. Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel, is an organization that provides educational travel programs for older adults. I’ve taken five of their tours and always found them interesting and enjoyable. This sixth was no exception.

Twenty-four of us, first-timers at the canyon, gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our guides would be Joel Kane and Rocky Sullivan. Joel, a geologist, previously worked seven years as an interpretive park ranger in Grand Canyon National Park. Rocky is a writer and cowboy poet who has also been a hot air balloon pilot and cabinet maker. Their kindness and expertise, and the uniformly warm spirit of the group members, made the trip work.

We spent one day exploring the red rock country of Sedona. The next day, we drove north from Flagstaff past the San Francisco Peaks, through a forest of ponderosa pine, ascending from 6,800 feet elevation at Flagstaff to 7,000 at the South Rim, arriving at mid-morning in a state of high anticipation. 

What would we make of it? Would our reactions echo those of many who have gone before, or is each person’s experience of the place unique?

We stepped off our van at the South Rim Visitors’ Center and walked to the nearby Mather Point overlook. Joel suggested we keep our eyes on the path in front of us and raise them only after arrival at the viewing point. I followed his suggestion.

“All right,” he said. “We’re there. Look up.”

I looked up. 

It was staggering. 

The visual scale was overwhelming. 

This was nothing you could prepare for, nothing I can describe. 

I-Max, eat your heart out.

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For thousands of years, proto-Americans and historic tribes have lived and worked in the depths of the canyon and on its rims. Today’s Hopi, Zuni, Hualapai and Havasupai peoples are thought to descend from earlier peoples who left abundant evidence of their sojourns. National Park Service archeologists have explored less than five percent of the region’s area, yet have found more than two thousand separate sites for study.

White, European people touched the canyon as early as 1540, when Captain García López de Cárdenas led a small group of Spanish soldiers to the South Rim. But it wasn’t until John Wesley Powell descended the Colorado River in 1869, with ten men in four wooden boats, that the words “Grand Canyon” came into the American vernacular. Until then, the region was unexplored. Powell, a Union officer who had given an arm for his country at Shiloh, put Grand Canyon on the map. Powell led another expedition two years later. 

Then, true to America’s genius for exploiting resources, others began to arrive: explorers, adventurers, fortune-seekers, builders. Many sought gold or other precious minerals. Ralph Cameron built a toll road to the South Rim and filed many mining claims, not so much to extract metal as to snap up choice real estate.

There came developers like the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, which built a spur line from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim; and entrepreneurs like Fred Harvey the railroad restaurateur, who established a grand hotel, El Tovar, on the canyon rim.

There were artist/explorers like photographers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, who opened a studio and made the earliest still and motion pictures of the canyon. There were artist/builders like architect Mary Colter, whose structures, often of native Kaibab limestone, defined a new Southwestern aesthetic style.

The lives of these pioneers overflow with remarkable incidents and exploits, enough to fill books and museums in plenty. And the feats of more recent Grand Canyoneers—such as the pipeline across the chasm, which supplies the South Rim’s five million tourists a year with fresh spring water from the less-visited North Rim—are just as remarkable.

But a question rises in one’s brain as all this canyonesque lore unfolds: What is it about this great vacuity—this vast rancho of open air bordered by extravagant tons of stratified, water-chiseled rock—that re-organizes the people, and even the space, within its realm? 

Maybe it’s something about the geology. Perhaps that’s why Joel, with his bottomless treasury of igneous and sedimentary arcana, is the person best qualified to guide our little expedition. For the canyon seizes one’s attention not just by its hugeness or its sculptural complexity. Rather, it compels one to think about processes. 

The Grand Canyon, 277 river miles long, ten to eighteen miles wide, and more than a mile deep, is the only place on Earth where such a large area of land came to be shaped in this particular way. 

As we amiable tripmates view the Grand Canyon from hundreds of angles at two dozen different viewing platforms, as we overfly it in a special sightseeing plane, looks of concentration and reckoning pass across the faces of my fellow Road Scholars. This visage is composed in equal measures of disbelief and recognition. It says: 

Something momentous happened here, on a giant stage, over vast reels of time. What was it? What happened here?

Joel explains as much as he can by dramas of uplift, folding, eruption, erosion—thick layers of different kinds of rock laid over one another, then dislocated by earthquakes, floods, and other cataclysms over geologic time. The simultaneous uplift of a huge tract—the Colorado Plateau—all in one piece. And always the irresistible power of water flowing downward. 

Rocky adds human dimensions—a keen knowledge and respect for the lore and practices of long generations of native Americans who have called this place home.

Questions remain, an unsettled feeling. This landscape was shaped by titanic battles among the forces of nature. Yet without us, it’s incomplete. I don’t mean to imply, Dear Reader, that it was all staged for our benefit. But without our presence, without our testimony—without our need to relate to the world where we have been placed—what could it possibly mean? 

We are a part of that we wonder at. If not, then how could we be so moved?

The canyon’s real presence demands some kind of imagination. And then you find your own imagination too small to encompass it. And you wonder, at least I do, what imagination was big enough to create it?

A visit here is a soul event. Maybe it was a pilgrimage, after all.

I can’t write about it yet, Gracious Reader. It’s too big.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer