Along the Way

Hats Off to the Wicked Winds of the Grand Canyon

Old Jake threw his hat into the Grand Canyon, and the Grand Canyon threw it back.

Jake Barranca and I were Grand Canyon guides, busing visitors along the Rims, telling them how wide, how deep, how long, and other pertinent details. In part, we guides were entertainers, and sometimes I got the impression our passengers relished a joke about trail mules more than learning the Grand Canyon was 2 billion years in the making.

Jake's specialty was spinning his wide-brimmed hat, like a Frisbee, into the Canyon at Lipan Point and having the updraft return it. His passengers loved it. To share in this excitement, I tried to time my trips along the East Rim Drive so my group would arrive at Lipan when Jake and his group did.

One day the Canyon tired of the game, and Jake's hat didn't come back. It floated downward into those infinite depths and disappeared. The winds driving against those limestone and sandstone cliffs and seeking escape upward just weren't strong enough that day. It took great discipline not to howl at the expression that spread across Jake's face. That hat cost him $12, big money back then.

I am not here to eulogize Jake, though he deserves it, but to tell of the wind at the Grand Canyon. We got plenty of it, and I loved it, but never risked my hat as Jake did.

In those days, it was important to The Fred Harvey Company, the concessionaire at the Grand Canyon and our employer, that we look "Western." Thus we guides wore, along with Levi's or Wranglers - not jeans, mind you pearl snapped shirts, high-heeled boots, and "cowboy" hats. The brims were three-and-a-half to four inches wide. In deference to Canyon wind dynamics in relation to brim width, none were broad enough to shade Rhode Island, as they are today, a la Garth Brooks. For additional insurance, we ordered them a half-size smaller than our head size and pulled them down so hard across our brows we got headaches; that because the guides saw it as effeminate to cling to the brims of their hats (or to use two hands to put a hat on). Most often the winds came UP those sheer walls, maybe from thousands of feet below, getting a grand shot at your hat from underneath. Numerous times, when my hat's brim was flopping and popping in a 40-knot updraft, visitors, often pitched against the gusts at a 45-degree angle, asked if my hat were glued on my head.

boots, and "cowboy" hats. The brims were three-and-a-half to four inches wide. In deference to Canyon wind dynamics in relation to brim width, none were broad enough to shade Rhode Island, as they are today, a la Garth Brooks. For additional insurance, we ordered them a half-size smaller than our head size and pulled them down so hard across our brows we got headaches; that because the guides saw it as effeminate to cling to the brims of their hats (or to use two hands to put a hat on). Most often the winds came UP those sheer walls, maybe from thousands of feet below, getting a grand shot at your hat from underneath. Numerous times, when my hat's brim was flopping and popping in a 40-knot updraft, visitors, often pitched against the gusts at a 45-degree angle, asked if my hat were glued on my head.

Another threat to hat loss was the pretty girl found in nearly every bus load. Hundreds of them along the way wanted to try on your hat, and more often than not their heads were smaller, and the winds at the Rim were trying to set records. I gave serious thought to a chin strap, but that too was considered effeminate. One guide, more secure than the rest of us, did wear a chin strap, and thus in a more relaxed manner he could concentrate on his spiel instead of worrying about the embarrassment of driving back to the village bareheaded.

The winds at Lipan Point, in particular, scared me, though not for fear of losing my hat.

Many of our passengers ignored requests to stay back from the Rim and perched delicately on the edge where powerful gusts rocked them precariously back and forth. In those days, there was no railing.

Off duty, I would sometimes go out on the Rim alone, often leaving my hat in my pickup truck. The Canyon had a power over me, and I would just sit there and stare at it and watch the winds widen the chasm, picking off a pebble of Kaibab limestone here and there; the winds, rain, snow, and gravity eventually moving them to the Colorado River, which would carry them into Lake Mead. The winds sang through the Rim-side crevices and across the Canyon's lip, through the junipers, the piñons, and the ponderosas, and only a psychologist could tell why I savored it so much.

One winter I worked for the National Park Service, and for living quarters I was assigned a house trailer parked in a stand of 75-foot-high ponderosa pines. The bedroom's back window was slanted, and while lying on my back I could peer out and up. In daydreams I can still hear those trees talking in the bright moonlight, swaying before those chilled winds, patches of snow being plucked from the limbs and flung into the night.

The day I finished my tenure at the Grand Canyon, I drove in a melancholy mood along the West Rim Drive. At Mohave Point, as I brought a camera to my eye, the winds sneaked up behind me, whipped my summer straw cowboy hat from my head, and delivered it into the Canyon. Before distance gobbled it up, I watched the currents play with it for at least five minutes, tossing it about, up and down, here and there. It seemed incredibly symbolic. Grand Canyon winds making up for the eight years they tried to get my hat, and couldn't.