The Old Man and the Canyon

the Canyon

Pioneering route-finder George Steck and his acolytes sought the solace of the Grand Canyon one last time by Craig Childs Photographs by Gary Ladd Wrinkle in Time Dedicated canyoneer George Steck, who died in 2004, spent more than 45 years hiking and mapping routes in the Grand Canyon. Asked if he would change anything about his time there, he answered, “I would do it just as I did.”

The old man sat in the bottom of the Grand

Canyon, relaxed among sheaves of bedrock. He posed like a lanky Buddha, his body resting on bands of red stone as if he had been born here. We had a camp down by the river where we lounged in the afternoon after dipping naked in frigid water.George Steck was 73 years old at the time, a pioneer routefinder from the Grand Canyon, a master of long journeys through an untrailed, cliffbound wilderness. He looked at me with wry, intent eyes frayed with gray, professorial eyebrows.Mean in the growth patterns of an agave, borrowing my journal to scribble out geometric calculations. It was our great debate, what math has to do with route-finding. The two of us argued to no end, sitting at his coffee table or wandering through canyons, me saying that it is no coincidence that he was both a

He was always looking at me this way, as if a question waited constantly on his tongue.

With a gravelly, slow and thoughtful voice, he asked if I would rather lose my eyesight or my hearing. I studied his face, unshaven and bristled. He was slowly losing sight in his left eye, his hearing peppered with hums and pops. That must be what old men think about, I mused. I told him I would rather not go blind.

I imagined he would agree. With a Ph.D. out of Berkeley, he was a theoretical mathematician who had spent most of his career inventing equations at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. I thought, of course he would choose to keep his eyesight. He would need to see the numbers and symbols of his profession. He also needed his eyes to feast on the slen-der ledges and boulder choked slopes of the Grand Canyon. Otherwise, how would he ever find his way through?

He did not answer as quickly as I had. He licked his lips and looked around the Canyon. "I would rather not go deaf," he said wistfully.

He told me he likes particularly melodic music: Brahms, Chopin, piano, wind, water. The rustle of a breeze through reeds. After that, we were quiet, listening to the hollow gulping of the Colorado River below us, the whisper of gusts across cliffs thousands of feet over our heads.

George spoke in mathematic riddles, always

Testing me, asking impossible questions, finding the Golden mathematician and a famed route-finder. It is the same process, I told him, scouting through wells of logic and numbers or picking your way across a terrain of palisades. His response to me hardly ever changed: a long, concerned glance, a smack of his lips and a flat denial. Math is math. Landscape is landscape. He said he could see my point, but it seemed esoteric, unproven.

I gathered his personal equations-pages upon pages of theorems, postulations, symbols, numbers and hardly a single word of English-in an attempt to understand the vast mechanism of his mind. Meanwhile, I traveled into the wilderness of the Grand Canyon with him, following his steps as year by year he slowed, staggering around the boulders, his eyes tinkering intently with small moves.

He had walked hundreds of days in the Grand Canyon. At the age of 57, he made his first 80-day trek from the beginning to the end, plumbing the stone for routes, clutching ledges with his fingertips. Of any land I have ever traveled, this place requires the most delicate of calculations. The Grand Canyon is an enormous and subtle riddle.

George chose a small number of inheritors.

We were the lucky ones. He shared knowledge of routes, of certain places and ways inside the Grand Canyon, of stories, recollections of flash floods and massive boulders calving off their cliffs, exploding into clouds of dust and debris. These stories

And routes were conveyed to us not at a kitchen table with maps unfolded, but in the field. George was 75 when we dropped off the edge of Marble Canyon in the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon. We carried our gear between pale and enormous pillars of Kaibab limestone, skittering down rockslide slopes-no trail anywhere in sight. He wanted us to know about a route deep inside-a cave that cuts through a cliff. Half a day down inside the first layers of cliffs and slopes, George sat down and decided he could go no farther. Too old, too tired, too far, too steep. He insisted that the rest of us con-tinue without him. He explained that his presence was no longer needed. By now we should have known well enough how to navigate, how to take the clues he had given us and find our way to the cave. From there we could figure it out. We left him on a ledge, a solitary figure watching over the depths of the Grand Canyon. Like weaned children, we moved with an awkward sense of confidence into the Canyon, move-ments full of timid boast, hand over hand, passing packs down. We each glanced up now and then, George long gone miles above us.

I once told George that I had been studying the geological framework of the Grand Canyon. I explained to him that the entire place had been built upon a pre-existing blueprint, an underpinning of faults and fractures. I had synthesized vol-umes of data about erosion and flash floods, running statistical equations through a computer. I determined that the shape we call Grand Canyon is as formed as the wings of a butterfly. It is a carefully balanced relationship between weather patterns, river meanders and geology. These vaults of side canyons that we traveled through, the deeply shadowed holes down in the Redwall and the massive platforms of Bright Angel shale could be defined numerically.

umes of data about erosion and flash floods, running statistical equations through a computer. I determined that the shape we call Grand Canyon is as formed as the wings of a butterfly. It is a carefully balanced relationship between weather patterns, river meanders and geology. These vaults of side canyons that we traveled through, the deeply shadowed holes down in the Redwall and the massive platforms of Bright Angel shale could be defined numerically.

He inspected me with a sideways glance. "You keep trying," he said with all seriousness, and then a smile.

The last great trek. George was 77 when several of us took a week to tumble into the western Grand Canyon, carrying pitches of rope to haul our packs up and down the gray-red cliffs. His movement between boulders was ticking and slow. Crossing back and forth over a clear stream on the Canyon floor, I saw a rhythmic tremor to George's step, to his speech, to his hands reaching out and planting on cool bedrock. His lips stuttered with tiredness, eyes blinking. Shadows gathered around us in the pearl-blue narrows of this limestone canyon. When we walked into a band of sunlight, he ordered that we rest. He laid his body over the rocks like a limp piece of fabric. Even in exhaustion his eyes tracked methodically across the terrain. A side canyon streaked up the wall across from us, its bends quickly vanishing. "You ever think about places like that?" I asked him, gesturing up the side canyon. "No," he said. "It doesn't go anywhere." "But aren't you curious? Even if it's a dead end? There are springs and pools up there, different shades of light." "That's your job," he reminded me. "It's a dead end." George had this trip timed, exactly where we were to fetch water, where we would set our camps, how many hours it would take to get from one place to the next. He had turned himself into a straight line piercing the labyrinth of the Grand Canyon. This journey was turning him into an old and rickety man. He could not afford a single step in the wrong direction. With no paths to follow other than his memory, we had been running packs down boulder stacks and sheer walls, climbing waterfalls, descending long smooth chutes of stone. He grew older with every step. Time to move again. I helped him up, our hands meeting. His skin felt old, but smooth, like suede, his finger bones loose and relaxed beneath leopard spots of age. I stayed back as he walked ahead. As soon as he was out of sight, I shot up the side canyon, tearing like a monkey between its high walls. Indeed, it was a dead end. When I found George at the end of the day, he was again sprawled across the ground, his body poured into the rocks. He frowned at me. I was the last to arrive. "Where have you been?" he asked. I was sheepish. I said that I had been checking out some routes. It was a lie; I was merely playing up in the canyons. He knew it. He excused me anyway.

Days of toil, stumbling through landslide boulders along the Colorado River, pierced by the sun, then swallowed by stinging shade. A kayaker backpaddled to talk with us, an excuse for George to wither back into the shade. We sat on a balcony ledge above the river. The kayaker was curious, saying that our walking with packs through this terrain looked tedious and exhausting. We assured him that he was right.

The kayaker finally swept away from us like a bird. I got George up and we continued, earth-bound, plodding slowly downstream.

Days later we were far from the river, climbing up through tiers of green desert lagoons and lapidary palisades. Moving slowly, we climbed into a hallway of cliffs, George coming up below me where his hand swept dust away from a hold where Canyon, a short trip, just to give a talk. I was heading into a wilderness in southern Arizona. Half joking, I reminded him of a promise I had made. When he felt he was ready, we would go into the Grand Canyon where I would pick up a rock and clock him in the back of the head. He laughed. Not just yet. But his laugh was only half-joking.

He died in his bed after returning from that Grand Canyon trip. When I heard, when someone quietly took me aside and told me the news, the world collapsed around me. The byzan-

These high cliffs were busy with shouts back and forth, rocks snapping free, ropes anchored, and tested with strong tugs. We climbed for hours. George spilled the last of his energy again and again until there was nothing left, his movements creaking like wood. He finally cleared his way to the top, where he collapsed onto the ground. One of the inheritors, a young man, poured water into his own hand, and pulled off George's hat to run his wet fingers through the remnants of fine white hair.

"That should cool you down," he said.

George conjured a deep smile, his eyes becoming sharp again. "Yes, yes. That helps."

The last time I saw George, I stopped at his house to pick up some climbing rope. He was on his way to the Grandtine framework of lines and webs that holds the Grand Canyon together for me dissolved.

When a few days later I stood at his funeral, I heard stories pouring out of all who knew him, the sweet, rippling sounds of voices, vowels swinging open like soft winds. It was not in the numbers, I realized. It was in the rivers of senses pouring into me as I stood in the back of the funeral.

I walked out to the watermelon light of late afternoon and shook the hands of mourners. I could feel the sweat of their palms, the bones of their fingers. Traffic nearby sounded like a swarm. My senses were suddenly sharpened. I could not help remembering the sound of the river mumbling its way through the Grand Canyon. I heard the far away rattle of reeds in a canyon breeze.

George got his wish. Never will these senses cease.

Craig Childs is an Arizona native. More of his writing about George Steck can be found in his recent book, Soul of Nowhere.

Photographer Gary Ladd of Page thought he knew the Grand Canyon very well until he met George Steck; it was then that his real Canyon education began. Both Steck, in 1999, and Ladd, in 2004, received the Grand Canyon Historical Society's Pioneer Award for their contributions to the understanding of and knowledge about the Canyon.