WALHALLA

THE FOG WAS BREAKING as we stepped to the rim. Clouds drifted apart like a stage curtain revealing an opening scene, and the show commenced — a gaping vault of canyon painted in purples and reds, sculpted into shapes too strange to be real. Standing there in the dissipating mist, it was as if I’d been dropped onto a new planet.

This should have been familiar territory. I’ve lived around the Grand Canyon for most of my life. Place me anywhere on the rim, and I can easily find a landmark to identify my location, but not on this day, not here. The rocks were familiar enough — ragged Redwall limestone, smooth Coconino sandstone — but the cliffs were stacked and jumbled in such a chaotic array that I could scarcely tell you which part of the great gorge I was peering into. It was disorienting. And wonderful.

Fittingly, the place where I sat in my blissful confusion is called Walhalla, the name taken from an ethereal afterlife place in Norse mythology. That Valhalla is described as “shining and golden, rising peacefully when seen from afar.” The imagery matches well with the real-as-rock Walhalla Plateau of the Grand Canyon.

The Walhalla Plateau is an extension of the greater Kaibab Plateau, that broad dome of high country that forms the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Seen from space, the Walhalla juts off the southeast corner of the Kaibab like some giant proboscis on an illogically assembled deep-sea creature. The Walhalla would be completely isolated, an island amid a sea of canyon, were it not for a narrow isthmus of land, literally yards across, that connects it to the main body of the Kaibab. A paved National Park Service road follows the spine of this land bridge out onto the cleaver-shaped Walhalla and clear to its farthest point, a place called Cape Royal. Surrounded on three sides by an expanse of canyon, it seems like the end of the Earth.

Even if one doesn’t travel all the way to Cape Royal, most of the roadside viewpoints on the park’s North Rim are on the Walhalla. And although we call it the North Rim, Walhalla viewpoints actually are on the Canyon’s East Rim. As the Colorado River slices into the rocks that make up the Grand Canyon, its waters flow from north to south for nearly 75 miles. Near the end of this southerly run — as the river begins to curve west, toward the Inner Gorge — the Walhalla penetrates the inside of the bend, and the finest vistas in the entire Grand Canyon are the result.

The first viewpoint visitors encounter atop the Walhalla is Point Imperial. At 8,803 feet above sea level, it also is the highest point anywhere along the Canyon’s rim. Naturally, this high vantage aids in the view, but it’s more than just the elevation that makes it special. Looking out from Point Imperial, one is looking not only into the sculpted abyss of the Canyon, but also beyond to distant mesas, peculiarly isolated mountains and the snaking slot of Marble Canyon beneath a vast plain. Come here for a good sunset, and you’ll be looking at perhaps the most breathtaking expanse in all of North America — and maybe the world.
 

THE FIRST EUROPEAN TO EXPLORE this surreal landscape and document it was John Wesley Powell, in 1869. Powell, of course, traveled by boat down the Colorado River, and when he reached its confluence with the Little Colorado River, opposite the Walhalla Plateau, he deemed the spot the end of Marble Canyon and the beginning of the Grand Canyon. At the time, it was a convenient place to make such a distinction, but the geologically erudite major would likely agree that the true start of the Grand Canyon is 10 miles upstream, where the Walhalla begins.

From Lees Ferry, where the Canyon’s geology first emerges, canyon walls rise steadily above the Colorado River without any dramatic widening. The gorge gets deeper with each passing mile, and it seems as if the river will soon be swallowed by a bottomless crack in the Earth. Then, at river Mile 52, just below where the Walhalla’s land bridge leaves the main plateau along the rim, the Canyon suddenly broadens into a maze of monuments and platforms, the sculpted landscape we all recognize as the Grand Canyon. If there is a place to delineate as the end of Marble Canyon and the beginning of the Grand Canyon, it’s here, where Nankoweap Creek reaches the Colorado and the Walhalla Plateau strikes out into its own, oddly shaped footprint amid the Canyon. To peer off the edge of the Walhalla is to look at the very birth of the Grand Canyon.

The clouds had dissipated into royal blue sky by the time photographer Bill Hatcher and I left Point Imperial to sightsee our way along the length of the plateau. At a roadside pullout, we followed a narrow ridge leading to two crumbling towers of Kaibab limestone. Near the base of the first tower, a clump of banana yuccas seemed somewhat out of place beside higher-elevation plants such as locusts and white firs. Bill thought it could be evidence of ancient agriculture — remnants of useful yuccas that provided strong fibers, natural threads for making rope sandals, centuries ago. If the yuccas were planted here, how did those Native farmers get to this place from the more fertile creek deltas in the Canyon below, where they were known to farm extensively? I scanned with binoculars, looking for a route through ramparts of sandstone, tracing each possible gully down — only to find, inevitably, a sheer cliff that would stop even the best climber. From here on, my every rim view would be burdened with a quest to find a route through the cliffs, someplace where people might once have climbed up from the depths of the Canyon.

We hopped into our van and continued south along the park road, back from the rim into forests of spruce and firs and aspens and ponderosa pines, forests so lush that early settlers called the Walhalla the “Greenland Plateau.” When François Matthes drew the first topographic maps of the Canyon in the early 1900s, he changed the descriptive “Greenland” to the more romantic “Walhalla.” Still, it remains a substantially green land.

Because the Walhalla is connected to the Kaibab Plateau by such a narrow peninsula, logging interests didn’t bother constructing a road out there to harvest the extensive stands of ponderosa pines. Today, mature groves grow in spacious, orange-barked majesty — the kind of forest we mostly just read about from historical times. Just weeks before we arrived, a lightning-caused fire had burned across much of the Walhalla, prompting fears of a blackened landscape, but our concerns were unwarranted. Fire here is a regular occurrence. Prior to settlement of the region in the late 1800s, the average fire interval in these woods was every nine years. After fire suppression began in the 1920s, that interval increased to 19 years, and shade-tolerant white firs began encroaching on the fire-adapted pines. Now, managers are returning low-intensity fires — sometimes prescribed burns, sometimes lightning-started — to the Walhalla, so that a healthy forest remains.
 

BILL AND I WANDERED INTO THE PINES along a retired fire road that led to a point called Cape Final. Most of the trees were stolid old specimens that might soar to 130 feet were they in a sheltered valley, but among the winds of the detached Walhalla, most topped out at 80 feet. That height limitation compelled the trees to instead put their energy into stout, prolific limbs, with crowns that blossomed into broad, broccoli-like tops. Like Tolkien’s trees come to life — the Ents — these ponderosas expressed charisma, reaching out with twisted arms, ancient and embracing.

Near the rim, the old pines relented to smaller piñon pines and hedges of giant mountain mahogany, normally a shrub but a dozen feet tall out here. The abrupt change was an indication of the warmer microclimate that exists along the edges of the plateau, where the deserts of the inner Canyon radiate warmth to the lofty rim. This environmental circumstance wasn’t lost on Canyon dwellers from a millennium past. They raised crops and erected dwellings at a place we now call Walhalla Glades, where evidence of their life is a bit more obvious than the few yucca plants we’d seen earlier.

Rectangles of stone, remnants of dwellings that were constructed 1,000 years ago, poke out of the forest floor at Walhalla Glades. Nearby, narrow trenches surreptitiously form a wavy texture beneath a covering of pine needles. “We call them waffle gardens,” archaeologist Helen Fairley says. “It was a way to trap water for growing beans — likely just a corollary crop to spread the risk if their crops down in the Canyon failed.”

So, the Walhalla was indeed a summer escape for Natives in rope sandals, with a little bean farming for survival. But how did they get to this place?
 

Finding routes of travel through the Grand Canyon’s imposing cliffs is an irresistible draw for Canyon explorers, from ancient times to today. The most lauded of all modern Canyon hikers, the late Harvey Butchart, found 116 routes to the river. The one Canyon feature named in his honor is located directly off the Walhalla. Looking south from U.S. Route 89A in House Rock Valley, there is a prominent formation that hints at something dramatic in the hazy distance — a crown of stone supported by sweeping, statuesque wings. The formation is one of 83 summits Harvey climbed in the Canyon, and this one is called Butchart Butte.

Just before our last sunset on the Walhalla, we scampered out to an obscure peninsula that promised a view of Butchart Butte and innumerable other formations. A sheer sandstone cliff below us broke into steep gulches of loose rock and thick brush — route possibilities. I couldn’t see enough from my perch, so I tiptoed, thinking light thoughts with each step, across a flat, dance-floor-like chunk of limestone that teetered on the very brink. From the edge, cantilevered over the emptiness, I stretched my neck to peer below, and there it was: a gully, wide as a city street and smoothly leading through the cliffs, as if the Canyon’s layer cake geology had been cut with a knife.

This was the way of the ancients.

I wondered what it might have meant to those people of the past to climb from their desert dwellings to the cool pines, dig some garden plots and return to the river. Was it just a commute, or a spiritual quest? If you always lived in the Canyon, would it seem spectacular, or merely ordinary? I’ll never know their thoughts, but I like to think they knew their home was something special.

For me, it’s both: a familiar landscape, but surreal, and with enough different faces to sometimes make me blissfully lost.