The Grand Grand Canyon

What is it that makes this canyon one we call GRAND? Perhaps the answers are bound up in many questions, for this canyon is complex and full of interwoven threads. One grows in understanding with the canyon - a single visit is only a brief introduction to a lifetime of wonder. Its sheer size perhaps first strikes the mind, for standing on its rims our sense of scale goes awry, and our level world ends precipitously.That is one secret of these canyons of the plateau country, for they seem to lie in wait for you as you travel across lonely vistas, and then explode on your consciousness. Without warning one confronts an incomprehensible gulf - an inverted mountain where one looks down to a dizzying spectacle. Our sense of proportion is distorted. Pinnacles and buttes beneath us appear no taller than houses; on closer approach they leave us as mere pygmies groping in an abyss.

By Charles W. Barnes We can only wonder, today, at how Don García López de Cárdenas, some 430 years ago, must have felt as he was stopped by the most overwhelming chasm ever to have been seen by men from the Old World. His reaction was one of horror and disgust that a life-giving river was so unreachable by horse, and surrounded by desolation of unbelievable magnitude in a parched and dreary land. Consider instead the words of Clarence E. Dutton, an early geologist-interpreter of the Grand Canyon, as he summed up his visual impressions: “... Everything is superlative, transcending the power of the intelligence to comprehend it. The grandest objects are merged in a congregation of others equally grand. Hundreds of... mighty structures, miles in length, and thousands of feet in height, rear their majestic heads out of the abyss... If any of these stupendous creations had been planted on the plains of central Europe, it would have influenced modern art as profoundly as Fujiyama has influenced the decorative art of Japan. Yet here they are all swallowed up in the confusion of multitude.”The Grand Canyon is also one of the most visited places on earth, filled with Indian ruins, tourist crowds, copper mines, and collared lizards. It served and serves as a barrier to migration, as a focal point for rugged adventure, as a magnet for human hardship beyond belief and human folly beyond compare. It attracts boondoggler, bureaucrat, and hero alike, and swallows up human dreams in its awesome size and impenetrable solitude. Yet, the Grand Canyon is more than spectacle, however outsized the scale.The Grand Canyon is also a biological smorgasbord of life, past and present. Environments include the desert's blistering heat near the river and the whispering winds in the tall pines on the northern margin. A summer's hike into the canyon from the North Rim starts in crisp pine forests and ends amongmesquite and cactus in heat that anoints the weary traveler in kindred perspiration as well as the sure knowledge that he must climb up a vertical mile and more to reach the cool breezes once again. The canyon is a vertical desert a slash across a fairly well-watered high plateau and the home of a stunning array of wildlife. Biologists and naturalists come from around the world to study this vertical array, for a hike up the canyon walls is equivalent in terms of life environments to a stroll from southern Mexico to central Canada! The vast panorama ofmodern life is matched equally well by the story of fossil life imprisoned in the rocky canyon walls. One may well be faced with standing amidst the remains of ancient algae imprisoned in the rocks deep within the canyon and watching the effortless ease of the canyon jay in the midst of his home what eons of change lie between these two life styles and both are a part of the dazzling biologic record of the canyon.

Man, the ultimate lifeform, seems peculiarly out of place in the vast solitudes of the canyon. He is ill-adapted to squander his energies in a wilderness of such merciless unforgiving, and history records relatively little impact of man on the canyon.

Earliest man left his twig-figurines and evidence of caveshelters, but European man has always been a transient in the canyon, requiring a substantial life-support system for extensive sojourns. The history of the canyon is filled with wrenching stories of those who underestimated its savage power to destroy the unprepared. The roaring, violent river the penultimate rasp the carver of canyons has claimed too many lives of those who have ridden its foaming, silty fury. To one disoriented in the canyon's vastness, death comes in many guises a sudden fall, an unending thirst, a frozen sleep. Only the Cohonina, Basketmaker, and Kayenta cultures ever called the canyon home, and in time, even they the “Ancient Ones” moved on to more hospitable places. For three centuries the canyon knew only silence, broken in the 16th century by the hoofbeats of Cárdenas and his men.For three more centuries, European man left little record of any interest in the canyon conquistadores, padres, mountain men all came and left, and the white space marked “unexplored” on their maps remained. The Colorado seemed destined forever to flow in lonely splendor, its rugged walls both the prison and the hope of a river running wild and free. All was quiet along the canyon until a little over a century ago when a man, both single-minded and single-armed, made the first passage down the roaring Colorado and filled in one of the last blank spots on the western frontier.

The man was, of course, Maj. John Wesley Powell, distinguished geologist-geographer-ethnologist-naturalist-soldier, whose vision and courage matched the challenge of exploration of America's last unexplored vista. Armed with the scientist's vision of what was probable and the prophet's sense of what the Colorado River might mean to the thirsty Southwest, he was the one right man to challenge this lonely cleft, and come away with his answer, and a profound insight, into what makes this canyon Grand.

STORIES IN STONE

The Grand Canyon is immense spectacle, human magnet, western adventure, vast resource, and biologic panorama. Above all else, as Powell quickly recognized, the canyon is the single most revealing chronology of earth history known to man. Its walls are a gigantic history book each layer a page of history of uncounted centuries. The history in these rocks stretches back nearly two billion years, give or take a few million years, and encompasses nearly half of the total history of this tired earth this home to life this good earth. It is a story which, telescoped together from our human vantage point, seems alien for the story is of trembling volcanoes, restless rivers, restless sands, restless seas an incredible tale written one grain of sand, one bit of life, at a time.

The story in the walls of the Grand Canyon bears one other resemblance to a book, for it is sharply divided into chapters, and the chapters subdivided into briefer glimpses. In another respect it is a most errant tale, for the story starts in the bottom of the canyon and ends at the top an adventure equivalent to reading a book from back to front! If we are to share with Powell and the thousands of geologists who have followed him, we must begin at the beginning in our mind's eye, and hike ever upward on the Grand Canyon trails, listening to the stories the rocks have to tell. Let's take such a hike, vicariously of course, and start in the two billion year old rocks in the very bottom of the canyon.

Two billion years! The words roll leisurely from the tongue, yet our consciousness somehow fails to grasp an unimaginable idea. 2,000,000,000 years! Seven hundred thirty billion days ... 20 million centuries. Our mind recoils, vexed at our inadequacy. Stand with Major Powell deep in the ancient, craggy glens of the inner gorge stand and share with him as he contemplates the gnarled black schists of the inner gorge these mute stones from which the craft of modern geologistchemists discern a birthday nearly two billion years ago.

"The walls now are more than a mile in height a vertical distance difficult to appreciate. Stand on the south steps of the Treasury building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol; measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to extend to that altitude, and you will understand what is meant.... A thousand feet of this up through granite crags; then steep slopes and perpendicular cliffs rise one above another to the summit. The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, with crags and angular projections on the walls, which cut in many places by side canyons, seem to be a vast wilderness of rocks. Down in these grand, gloomy depth we glide, ever listening....

Listening... ever listening. What have these ancient stones to say? Even their names are a struggle to the European tongue the Vishnu Schist the Zoroaster Granite. What strange twilight of the earth do they represent? Was it twilight or Gotterdamerung? Patient men who study the earth tell us these ancient twisted rocks record a commotion deep within the primeval earth an earth which had actually reached middle age. This disturbance within the earth, known more correctly as metamorphism, records titanic forces which pushed and shoved solid rocks around like silly putty in a child's hands. Massive invasions of molten granite date from the same fiery time the canyon's "birthday" records unrest within the earth on a monumental scale. The inner canyon visitor sees this handiwork today as a delicate tracery of pink granite through somber walls of greenish-black glistening schist.

The trained eye of the geologist reads in these somber walls a violent beginning to this Grand Canyon land but it was a story written deep within the earth. Miles above, the ancient skies were blue, the sun was shining, but the earth was racked with paroxysmal earthquakes of the sort that beleaguer modern southern California as the subterranean processes ground slowly to a time of rest.

And what a snooze it was! For nearly a billion years elapse before the rocks of the canyon begin to spin their song again. We have only begun to read the stories in stone, and already a mighty chunk of the tale is gone! It is as if Greco-Roman history was followed by the Renaissance! For the events of perhaps hundreds of millions of years the record is gone the rocks worn away and what is left is an old erosion surface a feature geologists call an unconformity. The mind and eye wander back over unimaginable time mountains, volcanoes, seas, deserts they all may have been here but they are gone. The ceaseless work of wind, water, and that patient giant, gravity, wore away the rocks overlying the ancient Vishnu and Zoroaster and cut deeply into them.

Dimension

From: “Grand Canyon The Story Behind The Scenery” Published by KC Publications, P.O. Box 14883, Las Vegas, Nevada 89114. Copyrighted 1967 by KC Publications.

THE GRAND CANYON

Length: 217 miles (349 kilometers) measured along the Colorado River.

Width: 4 to 18 miles (6.5 to 29 kilometers) with an average width of 9 miles (14.5 kilometers).

Depth: Average, vertical, 1 mile (1.6 kilometers or 1,609 meters).

From North Rim: 5,700 feet (1,737 meters) From South Rim: 4,500 feet (1,372 meters) Elevations: Difference between North and South Rims, 1,200 feet (366 meters). North Rim about 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) South Rim about 7,000 feet (2,134 meters) Tonto Plateau about 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) Canyon Floor at Kaibab Suspension Bridge 2,500 feet (762 meters).

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK

Established by Act of Congress signed by President Woodrow Wilson on February 26, 1919. Area measures roughly 56 miles long by 22 miles wide and includes 1,052 square miles or 673,575 acres. Administered by the National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior. North Rim is open mid-May to mid-October. South Rim is open all year. Includes most spectacular portions of the Grand Canyon.

THE COLORADO RIVER

Length: About 1,450 miles (2,334 kilometers). In Grand Canyon National Park 105 miles (169 kilometers). In Grand Canyon National Monument or adjacent to its boundary 40 miles (64 kilometers). 19 major canyons in the river's course. About 365 rapids along the river, with 70 major ones in Grand Canyon.

Width: Average is about 300 feet (91 meters).

Descent: From 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) to sea level. Formerly dropped 1,810 feet (552 meters) in Grand Canyon, now drops 1,515 feet (462 meters) to level of Lake Mead.

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT

Established December 22, 1932. Adjoins Grand Canyon National Park to the west and includes 310 square miles or 198,280 acres. Accessible only over primitive roads from north side of canyon. Includes recent volcanic features. Lava flows which dammed the Colorado River temporarily are now seen as rapids in the river. View from Toroweap overlook to Colorado River 3,000 feet directly below is magnificent.

GRAND GRAND CANYON from page 10

Around a billion years ago, some 12,000 feet or more (that's a stack over two miles high!) of fine-grained sandstones, siltstones, and shales were deposited on this old erosion surface. These rocks, exposed as isolated wedges largely in the area near Desert View, record the end of the beginning - an immense period of time stretching from the formation of the earth over 41/2 billion years ago to about half a billion years ago. This immense period of time 4,000,000,000 years, is the Precambrian Era in geological language. The Vishnu and Zoroaster rocks of the Inner Gorge record a part of the middle part of this era, followed by eons of erosion. The two mile pile mentioned above documents the end of an era. The rocks of the Grand Canyon have already brought us through more than three-quarters of all earth history - yet if we imagine ourselves hiking ever upward, we have barely cleared the Inner Gorge! Three to four thousand feet of sedimentary rock lie above us, patiently revealing another whole chapter in earth history. Before we plunge on, listen to another story from the stones.

The two mile wedge of sedimentary rocks we have just mentioned, (called the Grand Canyon Series) lie across steeply tilted ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks, and are themselves somewhat gently tilted. Not only do they bury an old erosion surface, but they are also cut at their top by another erosion surface known to Grand Canyon buffs as the Great Unconformity. This younger of the two unconformities is one of the most spectacular geologic exhibits in the walls of the Grand Canyon, and can be traced throughout much of the Park. It is often a relatively flat surface, marking the tops of Precambrian rocks everywhere, but in numerous places ancient hills nearly 800 feet high are covered by the overlying sediments. One can imagine a sea advancing (for the overlying rocks are of marine origin) across a moderately rugged area - looking perhaps like much of southern Arizona. Early geologists who examined many of these localities could picture angry waves dashing against granite cliffs listen to one early description: “. . . on the south wall of Hotauta Canyon one can imagine an island, undercut by the waves of the sea . . . (preserving an) old sea cliff (at the base of which) huge angular blocks of . quartzite are incorporated in the sandstone in places where they fell and lodged; farther out lie masses of boulders, worn and rounded by the pounding of the waves; and these boulders run into lenses of fine pebbly conglomerate, representing the shingle of the ancient beach, dragged out by the undertow.” Imagine the rocky battlements of a Maine seacoast in the Grand Canyon! Yet that is the story that is plainly told. The sea is coming! The sea is coming! Rocky crags are slowly worn down as the restless waves grind fine, and slowly bury the old landscape under a mantle of clean, white sand - the likes of which would be the envy of any beach party. A new era has dawned, aptly named the Paleozoic Era, or the time of early life. Life! Yes, the rocks above our heads are full of life! While the fossil forms in the Precambrian sediments are simple (largely algae), the fossil life above our heads is abundant and complex. The Great Unconformity must represent an enormous period of time time sufficient to wear down mountains perhaps higher than the Sierra (and of similar fault-block origin) and strip away thousands of feet of rock. Then, in comes the roiling sea, slowly inching its shoreline eastward as millions of years come and go quietly. In the sea life! Occasional trilobites, a complex crab-like animal, reward the patient fossil hunter. Life! A threshold has been crossed! As we step through the Great Unconformity, the hike takes less than a minute, but we have crossed a record of a lost 100,000,000 years or so, and witnessed the sudden emergence of complex lifeforms in a sea-deposited sandstone.

As we climb slowly upward through the sandstone, called Tapeats, we quickly came to the broad, flat Tonto Platform which marks the contact with the Bright Angel Shale - an easily weathered unit. What strange names the pages of our history book have - Zoroaster, Vishnu, Tapeats, Bright Angel - but these are the records left to read. Ours is a defective book as well a basket case for huge gaps are gone, and what is left resembles a jerky home-made movie. Erosion is a vicious and careless editor; many examples of its carelessness with the stuff of history lie ahead. Above the Bright Angel Shale is the Muav Limestone, and the pensive hiker may well recognize that he has walked through marine deposits of ever-deepening water. Stand on a Muav rock, and dream of Bermuda, with deep blue water, and you have the image the rocks reveal. Bermuda in Arizona? But is that stranger than a Maine seacoast? Ahead are limestones hundreds more feet of them and the names are again a part of the lore of the canyon Temple Butte - and the shattering vertical face of the Redwall Limestone looms above. Limestones all told nearly 1000 feet of them are the dominant feature of the "middle" part of the canyon walls. Yet each of the three limestones tells a different tale the lowest (the Muav) suggests deep water marine environments the middle (the Temple Butte) suggests tidal channel deposits the upper (the Redwall) represents a complex history of rising and falling sea levels, and each of the three is separated from its neighbor by yet another (although much less spectacular) unconformity. We are more than mid-way through the Paleozoic Era now, and our history book remains as flawed as ever! Limestone! What would the Grand Canyon be like without limestone! The Redwall receives its name from its appearance - a vertical cliff face, nearly 500 feet high of red rock, which successfully defies the effort of any hiker to take "shortcuts" in the Grand Canyon! What a story is imprisoned in these limestone ramparts for they are the vertical graveyard of millions of centuries of life. Billions of years ago, not long after the primordial earth sported a solid shell, the miracle of life transfigured the lifeless earth. The life was terribly small, simple, but rugged and full of possibility. Over the eons, these simple floating cells organized into colonies and began to fashion limy skeletons and shells. After death, their bodies drifted to the sea floor as a gentle white rain of limy shells. Time and a little pressure did the rest. Think of the half a thousand feet or more of limestone in the central walls of the Grand Canyon then think of this band stretching throughout the over two hundred mile length of the canyon and far beyond and finally think of this vast accumulation of lime as the graveyard of little lives whose numbers defy human comprehension and you will have understood another of the canyon's secrets.

Magic land of endless wonders. HERB & DOROTHY MCLAUGHLIN

Trudge upward above the battlements of Redwall, and the world changes abruptly, for we have crossed yet another erosion surface this one marking an ancient landscape pock-marked with caverns into the limestone. Think now of the Grand Canyon country with a climate and landscape like Kentucky's and you will be close. What a pot-pourri of geography has passed beneath our weary feet! Rocky granite seashores, sandy beaches, deep blue ocean water and now in the red rocks around us we must think of ancient streams, floodplains, and deltas in a savanna-type environment. The 1000 feet or more of red rocks which stretch above our head comprise the Supai Formation and the Hermit Shale, and document an abrupt change, for we have been climbing through ocean-laid rocks since we climbed out of the Inner Gorge. These soft red rocks have made two major contributions to canyon scenery staining the light gray limestones beneath them red on their surface (hence the name Redwall) and making gentle canyon slopes in vivid contrast to the sheer cliffs of lime below and sand above. The Canyon walls, then, are a series of giant steps. Rising from river level, the ancient metamorphic and igneous rocks of the Inner Gorge plus the Tapeats Sandstone make the first great cliff, broken by the broad apron of Bright Angel Shale and Muav. The Redwall makes the next stairstep, and the Supai and Hermit red rocks make the next gentle slope. Rest no longer, canyon hiker! The great white cliffs of Coconino Sandstone and Toroweap rocks lie ahead!

Ahead and above the world is off-white, the rocks freed from the plague of red that deluges the rocks beneath in every rainstorm. There is sand more sand and still more sand everywhere, and the layering sweeps across at crazy, long sweeping angles. We stand in the midst of an ancient sand dune field, and the world must have looked like the modern Sahara Desert. What world is this? It is a world of scampering reptile feet, whose tracks and footprints can still be seen, and a world of violent wind and sand. Some 200,000,000 years ago little lizard feet scampered here across the great white, lonely sand dunes where now our feet are placed - we scamper but little now. Five hundred feet or so of sandy limestone separate us from the cool breezes at the top. What an odyssey we have been on! Hours ago we stood among ancient, gnarled rocks in the Inner Gorge a twisted record of titanic forces in the earth's early days. Seas have come and gone, desert winds have blown, rivers have slumbered, uncounted trillions of trillions of little lives have been lived out with towering walls of limestone their sepulchral home. Now we exult as the top is in sight the Toroweap and Kaibab Formations mark the end, as well as a recognition that the sandy Saharan-desert of the white sands below us, was buried once again by the roiling sea, and the gentle rain of lime started once again.

We have passed through half of our earth's genealogy in but a few hours of upward toil.

Below us the imprisoned river toils at digging a deeper furrow, and we think of the horizontal record in these walls a 200 mile long panorama of gradual change as ocean gives way to beach which gives way to river and shifting sands.

The Grand Canyon stands as an awesome record of the stuff of much of earth history. Erosion has erased the last couple of hundred million years of history these are faithfully recorded in Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks to the north. What is left is a vertical newspaper a chronicle of ceaseless change. The earth is somehow always in a process of becoming. even the Colorado River itself is an example, for it is a newcomer to this land from only a few tens of millions of years ago.

In its own solitary way, the Grand Canyon is extraordinarily beautiful nature's ultimate achievement with time and water. The grandeur is of a scale so colossal that it somehow suggests design beyond the ken of transitory man for the river flowed before there was man, and the vast thrusting panorama reflected sunsets beyond counting.

But only man could be drawn here because there were fresh ideas to be gained, and vast dramas to be understood. Only man, confronting the timeless walls of this canyon could understand that the earth is still in the act of becoming. Only man could see rocks and envision oceans; only man could touch limestone and read the epitaphs. Only man could understand what makes this canyon grand, for without man there was no history and the rocks under a million fading sunsets stood timeless and silent.

This canyon mirrors a century of man's restless search for understanding the result is 20 million centuries of tumultuous history. No wonder we call this canyon grand!