TESTIFYING, O LORD As To RAINBOW BRIDGE

Of all the natural wonders in North America, Rainbow Bridge was almost the latest to be discovered. It isn't because of the brief time lapse since then that fewer human eyes have looked upon it than upon any other of our national monuments or any of our national parks. It's because of the approach to it a difficult condition, which measurably could be abated by the expenditure for trail-work and highway-work of just a few thousands of the dollars which Uncle Sam so profusely has been slathering about, hither and yon, during these carefree and splen diferous years. I claim it would be money well spent. I state this from the depths of a being still painfully saddle-sore at the locality where a being gets the saddle-sorest.

To be historical about it, it was not until 1909 that a party under the distinguished archaeological explorer, Professor Byron Cummings, accompanied by John Wetherill, famous pathfinder, and guided by a Piute Indian, pene trated through a most inaccessible terrain to what the Navajos, who knew it for centuries before these inquisitive white folks came limping in, called Tsay-Nun-Na-Ah, meaning "Where the Rock Goes Across the Water." And how the rock does go across the water! From Bridge Canyon Creek it rears, this rock, to a height of 309 feet and it has a span of 278 feet, being forty feet thick at the top, and its arch could swing entirely over the Capitol at Washington and still leave clearance for a troupe of New Deal congressmen to turn happy hand springs on the dome. There is an abundance of other figures touching on its general formation and its specific proportions, if you care for figures. In a case like this I am one who does not. For this is not a mathematical proposition; this is not even geological or geographical, unless you want to be technical about it. It is sheer cosmic poetry. Statistics, however sizable, just seem to curl up to insignificance when they start wriggling against a master achievement of the Divine Artificer a creation so gorgeously symmetrical, so overwhelmingly majestic in itself, and so starkly splendid in its setting that the English language just lies down and begs for help when you try to describe it. I know this the very first sight of it repaid for every new-laid blister upon my own setting and that, I may state for the benefit of any interested blister-fancier, means right smart repayment.

Anyway came, as the fancy writers say, a day; a day when two of us Buck Weaver and I lit out from Flagstaff via Cameron and Tuba City and across the foot of Moencopi Wash and past the head of Blue Canyon which is in some lights blue and in others, any color you'd care to think of. Good roads that is, good as desert roads go which means you won't mind them in dry weather, but would do well to travel with a rescue crew when it's wet went with us all the weaving distance to Inscrip tion House Post, which, literally, is the jump ing-off place for the main attraction. From now on, scenically speaking, I'm sure it's going to keep on being the main attraction of the entire Western Hemisphere for me. I took the thirty third degree in the lodge when I stood under that perfect rainbow which is frozen into ever lasting stone, and looked up above me and looked 'round-about me and testified before my Lord.

It is agreed, I take it, that Grand Canyon as sighted either from Grand View or El Tovar is, despite its freakishness of composition or perhaps partly because of that very freakishness, the incomparable spectacle of both the Ameri cas. Neither in the Canadian Rockies, nor in the High Sierras, nor even in the Andes has this onlooker ever beheld aught to match it, let alone surpass it. For shift and play of color, for scope, for balanced grouping, for weird model ing it convincingly is the hemisphere's suprem est masterpiece. Creation made the Grand Canyon and then threw away the mold. I hear tell the Himalayas also dish up some very sightly stuff, but they'll have to show me.

Admitted all this to be true, I nevertheless bear witness that the fourteen-mile mule jaunt to Rainbow Bridge considering what lies along the way and what theatrically awaits the traveler at the farther end furnished me with more thrills per square yard than ever I have garnered in a like space anytime anywhere.

By contrast, the Grand Canyon has been made convenient for the tourist. An air-con ditioned train fetches you to El Tovar's doors. You may sit on an easy couch and peer over its brim at the immensities below, knowing there is a luxurious hotel at your rear and that tourist The original story from which these excerpts are extracted first appeared in our July, 1940 magazine. Since the opening of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in 1964, Rainbow Bridge is only a few steps off the boat dock after a short trip "up the river," without eccentric mules and saddle sores, unless you happen to be one of the rare breed of purists who'll have it no way but the old way. For you the trails are still open.

camps and lunch stands are nearby and a paved thoroughfare leads either way along the edge. But to see the Rainbow you must cross about as rude a stretch of wilderness as is left in this country and brave some mighty brooding solitudes. And these adventures, even when negotiated with no special amount of danger, give the greenhorn a Daniel Booneish satisfaction the comforting thought of having earned his pleasure by undergoing travail and pioneerFacing hardships.

You have angled across a narrowed V at the head of First Canyon into Second Canyon and out again and are about to invade Third Canyon as a preliminary to traversing Cliff Canyon (I trust the reader is not getting confused) and thence through Redbud Pass to Bridge Canyon as I say, you've reached Second Canyon when all of a sudden you come on Forbidden Canyon and then perhaps an hour further you ride out of a pent-in side-draw which is a sort of hyphen connecting two infinitely larger gaps and are face to face with Wild Horse Mesa. At this range of vision Wild Horse Mesa looms like an unscalable back-fence enclosing the myriad of unearthly glories which spread across the intervening dip. Close by and beneath you are varied formations funnels and spirals and carved monoliths and, amongst and between these, curious worm-like arroyos, all changing though to faint clumps and shallow furrows where they lose shape and vaguely merge together away off yonder close up under the farthermost panels of runneled sandstone.

This noble barrier, with its base in the blended shadows and its top palings in the clouds, is so-called because stray mustangs that have gone wilder than any deer are said to frequent it which is more than puny mankind has done although there are those who claim to have climbed to the crest, going up an exceedingly precipitous ramp on the farther side. Well, maybe?

But until we develop sucker-disks on our feet and learn to cling to smooth outbulging surfaces like house-flies crawling on finger bowls, I'm reasonably sure none of our species will ever get down into Forbidden Canyon or, having got down there, ever get out again. So you see it also is appropriately named. Were it not that bandings of sunshine and cloudplay splash it with shifting pastel hues dun, ecru, soft brown, blush-pink, dulled lavender - what lies cupped in there would be like a giant paint-bucket scraped clean. It's the sensational coloring that makes the pageantry. Otherwise, the desolation would be so complete, the utter wastefulness of it all so depressing that you could imagine anyone who for very long stared down into that dreary pit going sick at the stomach. Birds fly above it but it is reasonably certain no living creature, anyway no two-footed or four-footed creature, exists in it.

At its farther end Cliff Canyon appears to butt smack into an escarpment of solid mountain. You are right up against it almost before you see that from top to bottom, this seeming barricade is split by a rift hardly wider than the foot-trail which pierces it. This is the famous Redbud Pass. Verily, it's like the Crack of Doom made usable. There are places where your outstretched fingers brush both sides and, looking up out of the perpetual twilight of the bottom, the sky is seen only as a tiny blue strip. You have the feeling that any moment the crevice may close shut and flatten you like a mite caught between two book-ends.

Along the slanting path through Bridge Canyon we followed the creek which, having tunneled out of some subterranean channel at Redbud Pass, now had grown to a widened clear stream, full of deep pools; and the trees were taller and bushier than anywhere else on the route, and so deep were the wild grasses that the trail was a half-hidden trace, and a shepherdless flock of Navajo sheep found the richest of pasturage as they browsed about, led by an old ewe. She had a copper bell at her throat-latch and in that solitude the bell's jingling could be heard for half a mile before we saw her.

Diverse curious indentations worn by the weathers of a million years high upon the canyon's tan-colored mural made a fascinating sideshow here. Yonder would be a squared doorway lintel, sill and jambs all complete; and just over there a tall unfinished archway, and next along a titanic picture-frame but no picture to go in it. And then perhaps a funnel or a swirl or an arabesque or an amazing rosette, like a pastry cook's decoration for some exaggerated caramel cake.

It was late in the afternoon and I was trying to sort out and classify for future reference a thousand different impressions, when we came to where the path forked. Right in the crotch was thrust up a smallish pone-shaped butte, heavily corrugated. Beyond the wrinkled withers of this dumpy obstruction we could catch a tempting peep at the nearmost pediment of the Bridge but Bill advised that first we get to camp and rub the cramps out of ourselves and then return and go past another little elbow in the gulch for a view of the thing in its entirety. So we turned right-wing and presently butted into a dead-end where the swoop of a future cave formed a half-moon above a sweet spring pouring out of the rock; with a brush arbor and a corral and a storehouse handy by, and two wall-tents with cots and mattresses in them and, crowning paradox for so untamed a vicinity, clean sheets for the beds and clean pillowcases for the pillows.

It's forty minutes later and the daylight is starting to fade on the lower shorings of the encompassing cliffs and I, being dismounted, am noting that I hurt in a lot of places where I hadn't hurt before, when we hobble stiffly beyond that interposing jog to a proper vantage point facing into the west and now, Mister, hush up your mouth and please just lemme pause and contemplate!

Already I have confessed total inability to describe what to me is the crowning achievement of the huge arena of uplifting magic in which it lies hidden. I shan't even try. I'd go downright delirious, whereas, at this date, thinking back and reliving that experience when I stood and soaked up pure loveliness through all my pores, I merely grow semi-hysterical. But I do crave the reader's kind indulgence while briefly I draw in retrospect some sketchy notion of that amphitheatre where Rainbow Bridge is flung up, a perfect symphony in pink sandstone, to unfold like a scroll thwartwise of the canyon's structure which, by contrast, is streaked with less graphic tones umber and amber and ochre and tarnished copper. But with no vain ornamentations to mar the surpassing grace of it, mind you; no superfluous curlicues to distract the fascinated eye from those altogether simple and most truly-scaled lines.

Except for the prodigality of coloring in which it is bathed there is a planned economy in every detail of the magnificent conception. And down below and beneath that splendid arching sweep, the little brawling creek hustles along, now riffling over its pygmy rapids and now boring between yellowish shores that are polka-dotted with circular splotches of bright verdure. And on under and beyond the arch, the sun goes down in a welter of unutterably brilliant cloud-wrack that is all crumpled and strewn like torn remnants of silk across the sky.

So in a kind of trance, a thraldom of happy catalepsy, while the inadequate tongue had frozen but the soul was quickened and the brain alert to absorb more and yet more of the beauties of it, I bided there until twilight made everything blurred, then dazedly stumbled away in the dusk, tripping over boulders and splashing through brisk eddies. It was just before the last of the sunset that the glory became almost too glorious to be borne. As the final benedictory rays played over the horizon and struck upon the upper reaches of the great span, what a moment before had been rufous, like a pochard drake's head, now flamed scarlet, like a tanager's breast; and mauve turned to royal purple, and palish green was emerald and dead gray was all of a sudden opalescent and gleaming like so much live pearl. A steep mica bed on the parent cliff alongside picked up a slanted beam and became a cascade of diamonds; the broken canyon floor lit up like a friendly hearth of ruddy firebricks. And yonder through the crescent of the Bridge the heavens flared with flamings of crimson and with waves of blue and of tattered gold God Almighty's housewarming.