EDITOR'S LETTER

Lewis and Clark had Sacagawea in their camp. Neil Armstrong had rocket scientists in his headset. John Wesley Powell had no one. And no real understanding of what was ahead. “Barren desolation is stretched out before me,” he wrote. “We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not.” Nonetheless, on May 24, 1869, the intrepid, one-armed frontiersman began an expedition that would make him the first person to run the Colorado River. One hundred fifty years later, he's revered, like Lewis and Clark, and the landscape he explored is protected as Grand Canyon National Park no more unknowns. This month, we mark the sesquicentennial of Powell's legendary voyage. It's a milestone that coincides with the centennial celebration of the national park. For that occasion, we made a book. It's a new book about an old park. Although Arizona Highways is a few years younger, we've been covering the park for parts of 10 decades. In all, we've published hundreds of stories about the Grand Canyon. For the book, we revisited every single one, and ultimately settled on 28 of our favorite stories. Stories written by some of the most accomplished writers in our archive: Raymond Carlson, Charles Franklin Parker, Joyce Rockwood Muench, Frank Waters, Craig Childs, Charles Bowden.

As you might imagine, curating nearly 100 years of content wasn't easy it was months and months of Sophie's choice. To help narrow the field, we focused on the stories that occurred after the park's official birthday on February 26, 1919. Because of that, you won't see any stories about Powell's trip in 1869 or the arrival of Coronado's expedition in 1540. The book is focused on the park, not the Canyon the Canyon's centennial, by the way, was about 70 million years ago.

Selecting the stories was a challenge. What to do with them was another dilemma. There were a few things in particular that needed resolution. The first was style. All books and magazines have an official style. Ours is derived from the Associated Press; Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition; and, to some extent, the Oxford English Dictionary. Sticking to a style helps ensure consistency and, in theory, provides a better experience for readers.

However, when you're resurrecting stories that were written over the course of almost a hundred years, there's bound to be some differences. Our choice was to either update all of the old stories, and apply our current style, or let them be. We decided to keep our hands off. In hindsight, we like the flavor of the old style, which features some odd hyphenations (“up-draft” and “snow-storm”) and all kinds of inconsistent spelling in the same story, we referred to a certain pine tree as a “piñon” and a “pinion.” The style rules for proper nouns were all over the place, too. Or maybe there weren't any rules at all.

Another thing we had to think about was fact-checking. To be clear, there are some errors in some of the older stories. In some cases, they were the result of a lack of information at the time the age of the Canyon, the length of river and in other cases there may have been a hint of hyperbole. Or folklore. Those things we left alone. We didn't want our book to read like a dissertation the rhythm of the writing would have been thrown off by the interruption of so many footnotes.

Also, we think it's interesting to look back and consider the level of understanding in the 1920s or '30s or '40s. Leaving the copy alone allows for a more interesting trip back in time. And that's really what the book is all about. It's a journey back to that day in 1919 when President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a bill establishing the Grand Canyon as the nation's 15th national park. And it's a storyline of some of the people, places and things that have made the park one of the crown jewels of the National Park Service.

John Muir once said this about the Grand Canyon: “It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make.” In the same way that words and photographs can never fully capture the grandeur of the Canyon a place that can be seen from outer space, a place counted as one of the seven natural wonders of the world no single book can fully tell its story. Ours is no exception, but it spotlights a few chapters of the bigger story. We hope you'll check it out.

Of course, the best way to learn about the Canyon is to be there. To stand on the rim. To hike down in. To run the river that was pioneered by John Wesley Powell.