A SENSE OF STONE

Each kind of rock can change your mood. Not in some subtle, subliminal way, but like a sudden turn of emotion. Like a slap in the face, then a kiss on the back of the neck. Sand will rub differently in your boots. One night it will provide good dreams; another, nightmares. You will grow meditative on the rims of the Esplanade Sandstone, with all of the open light and long vistas, then become wild-eyed and tense in the dusky narrows of Redwall Limestone. Each of your sensations will be scratched down to whatever formation lies below your hands or feet.

Down here in the lowest, darkest rock, I cannot help but feel that the Colorado River cut too deeply into the earth, that it exposed stone never meant to see the light of day. The river comes in from my right shoulder, leaves by my left, running determinedly through this shoebox canyon. The rock that is cut is Vishnu Schist. It is a fabric of dark Precambrian rock, 1.7 billion years old, fiercely solid. I am perched on an outcrop; I came all the way down this canyon but can’t quite reach the river 50 feet below. There is a kind of fear in the pit of these jet-black canyons. It is the fear of being watched or hunted by something much more cunning and capable than myself. I don’t know if it is an intrinsic fear of sudden floods, or just a stray chill. It brings my observations to the forefront. I watch everything carefully, as if it matters.

I have come with three others. I can see two of them, hunting for ways down to the river. Another is sitting alone where I cannot see her. We joined each other eight days ago. I had come out to resupply and take a few days’ rest midway along a walk from Tanner Canyon to the Aztec Amphitheater of Royal Arch Creek, a slowly walked route that will take 40 days. Twelve days remain.

Very little of the Grand Canyon bears likeness to the remainder of the Colorado Plateau. Elsewhere — say, in Southeastern Utah — the earth is bulging. There, you will stop at a dead end in Navajo Sandstone where curves take to the sky. In juxtaposition, the Grand Canyon has sharply terraced structures where, if you become blocked, it will not be at a majestically cusped and echoing amphitheater, but at a narrow crack with a 40-ton boulder jammed over your head. The Canyon is hard, biting. Routes resign themselves between cliffs, cliffs that are scattered everywhere.

This Vishnu Schist is the hardest of the formations, the final statement at the bottom of the Canyon. Try to follow the topography of this schist with your eyes. It is trickery. Picking out a canyon is like trying to find a speckled plover egg among brown stones. When I first became surrounded by the schist in Grapevine Canyon weeks ago, it was like a hall of mirrors, with dark flanges and corkscrewed hallways. There is no other rock like this in the Canyon, nothing so baffling. What looks like a cliff is a canyon. A cleft easily
10 feet wide becomes no wider than a hand. You walk through these inner canyons the way you turn pages in a murder mystery: looking over your shoulder, unable to put it down, not sure of what the next twist might be.

It is partly the gloss of the schist that causes this visual effect. It involves its dungeon darkness, its sharp-angled patterns of erosion, and its shift in colors from olive to brown to a reddish black verging on burnt blood. Often, what is considered to be a single formation actually may have manifold origins and textures.
 

By the late 1800s, the entire metamorphic basement of the Canyon was known simply as Vishnu, which since has been divided into the Vishnu Metamorphic Complex, Zoroaster Plutonic Complex, Trinity Gneiss and Elves Chasm Gneiss, plus a host of other minor formations. Most other formations of the Canyon tend toward structural simplicity, easily layered like book pages.

This rock down here is extravagant, kneaded in every direction, mixed with any other rock on hand. Depending on the regional forces of metamorphism and on the type of rock being heated and folded, different types of schist, gneiss and slate were formed. The glistening, flaking mica and quartz schists emerged from what once were sedimentary rocks, while the darker, purer schists developed from volcanic rocks. The volcanic segments originally were ash and lava flows, perhaps remnants of island chains much like the Aleutian or Hawaiian islands. Around these islands were quartz-rich sediments of sand, silt and clay. This whole matrix was pressed into the planet, heated to 700 degrees Celsius and twisted like taffy.

Thrown into this mix are brightly colored swarms of volcanic plutons, dikes and sills that broke into the hard Vishnu rocks just as the heaviest metamorphic activity ended, about 1.5 billion years ago.

At river level, where all of these rocks are scrubbed together, the granite set into the schist is as red and polished as a black widow’s hourglass. Some of the walls are tightly laced with these Zoroaster granites, and even they vary markedly in color and grain. There are bands only inches wide and those that consume canyon floors for 5 or 6 miles. Some of the intrusions broke their way into the schist at the peak of metamorphism, becoming properly convoluted, while others escaped metamorphism, maintaining their original shapes. Quartz, being slowest to cool and harden, sank to the center of these internal, molten streams, so that now you find pure, white quartz inlaid into pink and red bands of Zoroaster. This builds illusions.

It looks like madness down here. Darkness and suddenness, canyons that wind themselves tight down to the river. When we walk back along the side canyon, black walls of schist soar over us like ravens.

I have found it more reasonable to carry a geologic map than a topographic map here. A topographic map is a field of lines showing the elevation of local terrain in 40-foot intervals. Forty feet is not enough. All the necessary routes are the length of your arm or are hinged off of boulders that don’t appear on maps. Geologic maps look like abstract paintings. (I’ve seen them hung on living room walls.) Each color represents a formation viewed from above, so that the region is a sea of colors as various formations come to the surface. The colors themselves are a meaningless display until you have studied the tendencies of each formation: how the rocks feel to the touch, how well a piece will stay as a handhold.

Approaching the map’s bluish green of Tapeats Sandstone, you know that in the brief couple hundred feet of cliff (which shows few features on a topo map), you will at least have a chance of getting down, that the Tapeats is built of firm ledges where you can lower yourself, slinging your gear down, clambering behind. The drab green map color of the Coconino Sandstone means that you will have to walk for some time, maybe for miles or even days, trying to find a crack that takes you up or down. Handholds in the unexfoliated schist will be firm. Those in the Dox Sandstone will come apart like pastry. Redwall Limestone in a canyon floor will be smooth as a cowrie shell, while the same limestone lying in the open against rain and wind will be sharp as a cheese grater and will tear skin.
 

After days inside the hypnotic waves of schist, we eventually emerge onto one of the interior rims, the roof of Esplanade Sandstone where we can spread our arms and breathe against the wide sky. On this evening, we gather food and supplies at a cache, treating ourselves to fresh garlic and olive oil in pasta, to single-malt whiskey sipped as the sun drops and warm clothes come on. Dusk light lingers with a gentle, powdery glow. The seasons have changed. November has brought a solid coolness. Mornings and evenings now are sharp with cold.

When I met my partners for this leg of the hike to Royal Arch Creek, we walked down between Redwall Limestone cliffs as light, early November snow turned to mist, dusting our faces and shoulders. That day, one of my companions came with me along a small drainage where we found water holes in the Supai Formation. Rain runoff had gathered in the slick, flood-scoured cavities in the floor, as it does so well in the resistant, red sandstones of this formation. Down on all fours, lips to the water. He said he had never done it before, drunk straight off the rock. He came up with water dripping down his chin. Baptized.

Beyond our cache, the heads of small canyons pinch against higher cliffs, sending us into steep cascades of Hermit Shale. The damp shale darkens our boots with a deep red. Over our heads looms the white of the Coconino Sandstone. We each look up now and then, taken by vertigo, by the sweeping crossbed lines of the Coconino that arc into the sky and turn into high cirrus clouds. Every stab of cliff that rises high enough in the Canyon is crossbanded by the Coconino, a strong white sandstone prominent against surrounding rusts and pastels. It is the first formation to warm in the morning, the last to hold light at dusk. It is the remnant of great coastal dunes, where impurities were winnowed out by constant ocean winds, leaving this raw quartz sand to compact eventually into a pure sandstone. One of the more striking contrasts in the Canyon is the one between the Coconino Sandstone cliffs and the slopes of Hermit Shale below. White and curry-beige walls stand on red, inarticulate shelves. The polarity is striking.

This partnering of massive, solid formations and weak ledges is what gives the Canyon its famous visual terraces. Using unorthodox optimism, geologists refer to cliff-forming rocks such as the Coconino as “competent.” The weak mudstones and siltstones of the Hermit are “incompetent.” The grains of the Coconino were carefully packed by winds, sorted as if a gem glass had been used, granules placed with fine tweezers so that they would fit neatly into each other. This homogeneity gives the rock strength against erosion, allowing it to wear like a statue. You see this in the Coconino, the Redwall and, to a lesser extent, the Supai and Tapeats. These cliffs are interrupted by the talus-ridden slopes of Hermit Shale, Bright Angel Shale and Dox Sandstone, where the formations are too weak to hold themselves together or to support the cliffs overhead. The cliffs cave into huge blocks, littering the slopes below. This arrangement is what you gaze upon from the rim. It is the stark, striking angles of cliffs and steps that invite lithograph artists who use straight edges as painting tools.

Our walking slows toward the end of the day as we drop from the Hermit Shale to the Supai and, below, take ledges into deepening canyons. Backpacks are sent down on webbing. We drop into the Redwall Limestone, where we hold our breath. Light turns gray, mingling with the scoured cliffs of blue limestone. Shoulders and packs rub on rock because the walls have come together, almost touching. There is no more room. The sky closes. Again, emotions shift.

There is the waiting, five or 10 minutes, as someone climbs down, cumbersome with a large pack. As the canyon narrows, sounds arrive. Sounds of fingers sweeping pebbles from handholds, the slow bustling of gear, tightly exhaled breaths on the downclimb. The nervous laugh. The quiet voice. Stephanie reaches out to brace my foot. I lower some webbing Josh can use as a hold. Mike braces Stephanie with his shoulder. We become gymnasts of the Redwall.

Redwall Limestone is red only where the Supai Formation and the Hermit Shale have been leaking iron oxide. That is the color of the big cliffs: rain-driven rust. Inside the canyons, the rock is worn to its native color, that of an overcast sky. The Redwall is the monumental formation of the Canyon. It dominates almost every view from the rim, looking like the Great Wall of China going in and out of each canyon below. These folded robes of cliffs are a barrier to everything except birds and wind-carried seeds.
 

Historic and prehistoric trails (often the same) depend on a break in the Redwall to reach from the river to the rim. Harvey Butchart, a man who walked more than 15,000 miles in the Canyon, logged 164 routes through the Redwall Limestone. Most of the routes are across tough exposures and into cracks. One, near Enfilade Point, eluded him for 10 years. But Butchart knew it was there. He had heard about a route once used by Havasupais farming the delta at Fossil Bay Canyon.

He told the story of approaching a Supai man who had just emerged from a sweat bath. The man, still covered in sweat, got out his glasses with only one lens intact to examine Butchart’s map. “I don’t know — maybe he didn’t understand maps,” Butchart said. “Anyway, he said he couldn’t remember, he was too small a boy, but his father had taken him down there. So, that left me pretty much in the dark.”

So, Butchart tried spotting from an airplane to find the right crack. Then he trekked into the Canyon repeatedly on foot.

“I found I could get down this break in the Redwall,” he said, “although in one place I had to face in and go down ledges with hands and toes. Where there was a big chockstone, I had to go bypassing it and found out I could get across to where I’d already been from the bottom up. So,
I completed that trip through there. Called it the Enfilade Point Route.”

The routes in the Redwall are either cracks and natural stair steps down the massive cliffs, or they are passages through canyons such as this. The shape of a canyon is determined by the particular formation on the floor. If the floor is of Hermit Shale, then the canyon will be wide, having broken into a weak layer that erodes laterally, giving space to shout. If the floor is like this, Redwall Limestone, the cut is narrow and sheer. You keep your voice low. When, eventually, this canyon is carved through the hard limestones and into the loose Bright Angel Shale below, it will pitch outward.

For now, we are in the limestone, wading through the accumulated water of springs, our packs hiked up onto our shoulders so they don’t get wet, boots tied off as we go barefoot. Western redbud trees hug the walls, along with the low, crowded leaves of snapdragon, crimson monkeyflower and yellow columbine yet to bloom. Camp is set, hanging like an ornament among great ledges where the canyon contacts Bright Angel Shale and walls fall apart, no longer held sturdy by the Redwall. The canyon drops below among towers, archways and stairways where waterfalls plunge. The place looks like a geologic rummage sale. Spare cliffs, theatrical skylines, boulders left over from floods. The cleanness and definition of solid limestone have ended.

After the sun has set, we bring our sleeping bags together and eat a meal of rice and spices. Evening slides away as we watch, stealing the light and all knowledge of upstream and downstream. Finally, the only element of direction remaining is the sound of the small creek. The sound is evidence that in this thrusting, toppling canyon there is order. The soft, persistent sough of water.

In the morning, we rappel a short distance and work down into the Bright Angel Shale. Colors in the shale (where you are able to find the shale exposed from beneath crashed limestone of overhead cliffs) are not repeated elsewhere in the Canyon. Mostly it is pale green, a green you can see clearly from the rim. Viewed from the top, the Bright Angel forms an apron throughout the Canyon, a place where you can walk in full view of the highest rims. The shale layer is the softest object to touch your eyes, from miles away looking like it is being poured. The green comes mostly from the mineral glauconite, which resides in many of the formation’s shales. Up close, though, the glauconite does not dominate. Up close, you are looking at a spilled box of paints.

Talk with people about rocks in the Canyon, and you will not often hear of the Bright Angel Shale. It is one of the incompetents. Even pleasing to the eye, it is not why you come to stare at the Canyon. It is not one of the bold, terrifying cliffs. It does not offer an adventurous climb, only a sloped platform on which to walk and a good place to sleep if you wish to be blanketed in stars. But it is a visual anchor in the Canyon’s configuration. You will hear of it from artists. I once spoke to Bruce Aiken, a painter who lived and worked inside the Canyon. No other formation gripped him so much.

“When you get down onto the Bright Angel Shale and tramp around on it, you start seeing the yellow and the purple with the green,” he said. “And when those three colors come together, they’re really beautiful when you put them next to each other. Yellow and purple, anyway, are opposites on the color wheel — what’s called complementary colors in the world of art. When you put purple and yellow next to each other, you’ve got a vibrating situation. The colors vibrate, literally; it just sets up tension. Think about baseball uniforms. The New York Mets have blue and orange piping on their uniforms. Those are also opposites on the color wheel. That kind of thing is done a lot in sports or in advertising. It’s attractive. I see it when I’m walking along the trail.
 

There are baby blues, too. Layers of an applesauce color and fresh-cut beets and the inky purple of black bean juice. One small layer within the Bright Angel Shale, only about
4 inches thick, holds a crumbly, luminous mudstone, too weak to make an actual rock. It comes apart like dry bread in the hand. It is the color of a red wine stain on a white tablecloth, yet if you look closely, you can see a sheen, the kind of lustrous shine you get from beetle carapaces. Rubbed between fingers, it becomes a pigment and adheres to the skin. I rubbed this across my arms and legs once, and the soft blush stayed for two days.

The shale certainly is variegated, but it also is a tactile formation, riddled with trilobite and worm tracks left in fine mud about 300 million years ago. The trace fossils of burrows and drag marks were left in a mud once so fine that if you had set your hand down that long ago, your fingerprints would now show as fossils. These are accompanied by the fossils of primitive mollusks, echinoderms, sponges, algae and trilobites. But mostly what can be seen are these jumbles of traces. There is enough detail that individual shapes have acquired their own nomenclature, the same way an animal will be named by species and genus. The mark of a trilobite at rest is Rusophycus, while one in motion is Cruziana. This can become so specific as to be offered a full title such as Cruziana arizonensis, which is the track of a mobile trilobite found in layers just below the Bright Angel Shale.

At the downslope tip of the Bright Angel Shale is the Tapeats Sandstone. The shale simply hits this firm, brown platform, then a sheer drop of several hundred feet lies beyond. Whenever a canyon passes through this sandstone, it squints just for a moment, just long enough — a couple hundred vertical feet — to change the entire topography. The revealing sunlight and layered pastels of the Bright Angel close into narrow darkness, into sandstone hues of coffee and cranberries. The narrows of Deer Creek and Blacktail Canyon, the big waterfall on Stone Creek, the perfectly straight stream of a waterfall in Red Canyon — these are all classic effects of the Tapeats negotiating with a stream course, where tall chutes of carved rock drop into shade, then suddenly open into whichever formation is there. Below, the Tapeats is an unconformity, a plain of rock eroded and now missing from the sequence. Because of this, the next formation is sometimes the Vishnu Schist, sometimes the Dox Sandstone, depending on what was last eroded before the Tapeats Sandstone was dropped into place. The Tapeats is the threshold.

We decide to scatter into this rock. The agreement is that we will meet the next day at Copper Canyon. But for now we go free, looking for our own places, for brief tastes of solitude. The Tapeats is a good place for this. A hide-and-seek formation, it breaks into ledges like stacks of cardboard. I walk for most of the day along its rim before setting camp, a camp that hangs nearly a thousand feet above the Colorado River. The river breaks around shields of lifted Zoroaster Granite where Waltenberg Rapids bathes the cliffs in a steady roaring. It is a perfect place to sleep: the lulling sound of Waltenberg and the flatness of these stone planks with ceilings overhead. In the Tapeats, there always will be a level place for my back, a burrow to crawl into.

Tapeats was deposited about 500 million years ago, mostly in the form of streams spilling across tidal regions, hauling pebbles and coarse-grained sands to the sea. Kernels of rusted, orange grains stand from the rock’s surface. The passing of different sizes of creeks and different sources of materials can be seen in the sediments left behind. Larger grains imply larger flows, and you can follow with your fingers exactly how and where these sediments were abandoned. Groundwater moving through the porous sandstone has precipitated iron oxide, which now appears as fluid, purple bands. These iron oxide designs — styles more common to the backs of seashells than to rocks — pass vertically, ignoring the boundaries of the original streams and their original sand. It is a good place to sit, reading through words written all over the sandstone.

As I read the next morning, I turn to see two big rocks in the air, fallen from the top of the Redwall. As they turn, they show their pale undersides the way fish flash their bellies in the water. Two feet across, maybe 3. They vanish behind an outcrop of Bright Angel Shale. Seconds later I hear the impact. Sharp cracks. Echoes.
 

After we meet in Copper Canyon, we move on, and in coming days, we cross all of these formations, walking out to the rim where my truck is parked. The rim, the uppermost formation, the farthest from Vishnu Schist in color, shape and distance, is the Kaibab Formation. It is the roof of the Canyon, presenting itself as a cliff, as sharpened hoodoo towers, and as slopes dressed in piñon pines, junipers and cliffrose.

From east to west, the formation changes noticeably. It consists of about 75 percent sandstone at the far east, near Desert View, and nearly all limestone to the west. This has to do with it being formed from an ocean floor, influenced greatly by its proximity to a coast. The western shore of a continent once ran between Holbrook, Arizona, and Southeastern Utah, leaving the region that would become the Canyon submerged in a shallow sea.

At an archive, I once examined a 1934 sketch by Edwin McKee, who then held the job of park naturalist at the Canyon. He titled his paper Common Fossils of Open Seas During Kaibab Times and drew six mollusk shells that he had gathered. Careful observation had been made of the smallest details, the roundness of a marble-sized Composita and the 66 radiating lines of a broad Derbya. He drew them as he found them, with their roughened edges, using dotted lines to suggest their shapes prior to erosion.

At the bottom of the page, McKee had drawn a cross-section of the Kaibab Formation from one end of the Canyon to the other, showing how more brackish-water fossils appear in the sandstones to the east, while marine fossils dominate the limestone-riddled west.

McKee implied that streams off the land once entered the Kaibab Sea from the east, turning the water brackish and depositing sand. Meanwhile, the west remained far offshore and without fresh stream water, gathering a different biota entirely. He wrote, “It is hoped that this brief sketch of certain conditions in the Kaibab Sea will give something of a picture, and one of reasonable accuracy, of a small part of that most unusual and remarkable period, the Permian.” The paper was yellowed, but well kept and still firm to the touch, a fossil itself.

Moving slowly through the shade of piñons, up through packs of snow kept frozen on the cold north-facing rim, we reach the top edge of the Kaibab Formation within half an hour of each other. I stop before clearing the rim, watching the dawn. Then sunrise floods into the Canyon below. Cold this morning. I pull out my journal. I am sloppy with the pen — even with the fingers of my gloves cut off — as I back against a juniper trunk, propping my journal between my knees. The first sunlight comes haunting the Coconino Sandstone. The rock appears saturated with cadmium in the first couple of minutes of light, then surrenders intensity to the formations below. Rows of Redwall unfold as the sun works inside of each available canyon.

I take out the topographic map and look at the route just completed. I have never traveled in a place with so many alluring names as the Canyon. Names crowd the map. I find different landmarks with my finger, places I have circled on this walk. It is fascinating yet disturbing to see so many names. A sequence of side canyons — Topaz, Slate, Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Ruby, Serpentine, Copper and Garnet — are named more from convenience than from any notable aspect of each canyon. The points that reach farthest out from the South Rim are named for American Indian tribes. Landmarks gathered in certain regions are named after Eastern religions or Spanish explorers. From these appellations, the moods of John Wesley Powell or government cartographers can be deciphered better than the moods of the landmarks themselves.

Studying this map, I think that when a map looks more like a dictionary than a landscape, we have misunderstood something important about the place. Still, inside of these canyons we bleed when we fall, and we still sleep like children when cradled by boulders. Even considering the maps and names we’ve made, the depth of our innocence here startles me.

I put away the journal, fold the map. The Canyon possesses a largeness that does not translate into cubes or feet or titles. No common dimensions are stored here. It is in stillness like this, when sunlight reaches into the Canyon, that the size becomes most tangible. It is not the proportions given on a piece of paper, the length and width of the place. It is the knowledge we have about each stone we have touched. I try to remember as I watch the sunlight, try to remember the contrasting feel of the rocks. This is when
I have some sense of what is down there. More than can be mapped. All the categories are shed into individual stones that we weighed in our hands. Familiarity comes from a kneecap scraped across the toughened surface of a Redwall boulder. These are the contents of the Grand Canyon.