EDITOR'S LETTER

I watched the sun set with one
of the richest men in the world. We met by chance. At the Grand Canyon. I was up there to hike the Hermit Trail. It was about 6:30 p.m., the night before my hike, and I was lingering with the masses outside El Tovar. I still had about 15 minutes before sunset, so I went inside the old lodge, where I saw Superintendent Dave Uberuaga standing with a dignified but nondescript gentleman. I had no idea who he was, but Dave waved me over anyway and introduced us. The name was vaguely familiar, and then it came to me.

Turns out, the dignified but nondescript gentleman was one of the five richest men in the world. I don’t know where he ranks now, and I didn’t bother to look, because it’s not important. Not when you’re watching the sun go down over the western horizon of the Grand Canyon. On paper, the dignified gentleman and
I have very little in common, but that night on the South Rim, our portfolios were irrelevant. We just stood there, together — no words, no pretense — mesmerized by Mother Nature’s denouement on the world’s greatest stage.

Although Ken Burns is usually credited with the quote, it was Wallace Stegner who first proclaimed that “national parks are the best idea we ever had.” If you’ve ever watched a sunset at the Canyon or hiked the Panorama Trail in Yosemite or made the drive to Denali, you get it. Some of the world’s most impressive landscapes are within our national parks.

This month, the National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary, and we’re joining in with a portfolio of Arizona’s 22 national parks, which range in size from 40 acres to more than 1.5 million. Somewhere in between is Petrified Forest National Park, which is where we sent Craig Childs to find an essay. We were seeking words. He was in search of solitude.

“The silence we were looking for,” he writes in The Sound of Fallen Trees, “had something to do with time. We needed a place where quiet has been dwelling for millions of years. We entered this desert to let history unspool, letting time trail away, giving the present a fair head start. When we came upon the first piece of a petrified tree, a zinc-white round of a Triassic conifer trunk in the middle of the wash, the well of eons opened wide.”

It’s a beautiful collection of words that leads into a short piece on three proposed national monuments: one near Sedona, one along the Gila River and another up north near the Grand Canyon. The plans are in place, but it will take congressional approval or the president’s pen to make any of them happen. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, as I write this, my good friend and colleague Dave Uberuaga — another dignified gentleman — is in his final days as superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. After 31 years with the Park Service, he’s retiring to spend more time with his wife, two daughters and four grandchildren. Our loss is their gain. On behalf of everyone who loves America’s greatest national park, thank you, Dave. We’ll miss you.