Travel

Ours is the canyon country. Here are the mountains from which came the rivers that carved so deeply in our soil. Ours is the up-and-down country, the steep country from which the floods came from the rains and the streams from the snowbanks to hurl themselves with demonic fury downward. Ours is the arid country where the foliage was not thick enough nor strong enough to stop the mad rivers on their way to the sea. Without hindrance or hesitation the rivers left their deep marks that will stay forever on the land. Here, when time began, came those cataclysmic disturbances that tossed the earth upward in great wrinkles and crevices. Here the winds, too, came to claw at the naked soil and the hot suns of summer came and the cold clutches of winter to crack the rock making the solid rock itself prey to the river; so that everything had to bow to the river's will.

A matter of erosion, the scholars say, their eyes bulging behind their glasses, their books weighty with accumulated wisdom. Not erosion, my friends, but cosmic poetry. These canyons are not a matter for your scientific minds, but are the concern of the souls of the people of the canyon country. To them no world is complete without these canyons, and the distant mountains that had so much to do in the canyon making.

These people from the canyon country see only dullness in the flat, tedious, endless prairies of the Middlewest where the sight loses itself in distance, meaningless distance that has no beginning or end. Their canyons are worlds in themselves, amenable to their moods, changing with the seasons, temperamental and sometimes cruel, but never, never dull.

There are little canyons and big canyons, deep canyons and wide canyons, shallow and narrow canyons, the latter hardly deserving to be called canyons, only gulches or gullies. All of our land is carved up and marked by canyons for this is the canyon country.

Some are so deep and precipitous that they were marked as evil things on the old maps, things to be avoided by all travelers. Only the engineer with his bridges tamed them and today the fiercest needs no longer be avoided or feared. Of some canyons, man knows much; of others, he knows very little. These await some adventurous traveler of the future to explore their depths, to unfold their mysteries. Some day the adventurous ones will come to find them out, adding new chapters to our canyon lore. It seems strange that in this modern era of ours there would be sizeable portions of earth's surface cut deep with canyons of which we know little, but so it is. Some of these canyons are pages in history, epic postscripts in the story of the people who have come and gone into this country through all the ages.

Canyons have personalities the same as people. Some are gentle, some sombre, some friendly and merry, some of forbidding mien always wearing a frown. Nor are all the canyons built on the same pattern. Some wind and twist and turn, having a hard time making up their minds where they are headed. Others go straight and true, confident of their journey and direction, anxious to get their business done. And as it should be in this colorful land we turn to our canyons for our most engaging color schemes, the like of which no landscape in all creation can equal. Yet each of our canyons has colors peculiarly its own and no canyon wears the same hued jacket all the time for the colors change as the day changes, change with the weather and the seasons.

Go where you will in this land you will come upon a canyon. The country is full of them, their very names adding to the spice and lustre of the map that guides you. When you have the time, and some day there'll be time for all of us to follow the vagrant trails again through our West, you might have a grand adventure in the canyon country, visiting those that are so vociferously proclaimed in travel literature, seeking out the many others that remain unknown, or known so little.

You might start in the north and work your way south following the canyon trail, be a creature of their lure and spell, absorb their story of bygone ages, learn what they have to tell of time, O patient time, and the weather.

There in southern Utah in the high mountain country is Bryce, the canyon of the pillars, spires and pinnacles, a phantasy in creamy yellow and orange, almost weird in its mad sculpturing. Designated as a national park, and rightly so, it will be for all time preserved and unmarred for our citizens, remaining unchanged always, a place of rare beauty and strange rock formations, a very jewel in the canyon country. History records that it received its name from Ebenezzer Bryce, a pioneer in southern Utah, who was supposed to have been the first white man to have seen it, his startling discovery being made when he was looking for a cow, lost, strayed or stolen. History does not record whether the good Ebenezzer Bryce found his cow, but it is unlikely that he did. He would have had to be a very practical and stolid man to keep looking for a cow after having found the canyon that bears his name. It is more than likely that when he later told his neighbors of his find, his eyes shining with the splendour they had beheld, those same neighbors must have listened with disbelief and were strongly convinced that Ebenezzer had had one swig of applejack too many.