THE GRAND CANYON- A VINTAGE DESCRIPTION

The Grand Canyon

No writer of worth has ever seriously attempted to describe the Grand Canyon; no artist has ever adequately portrayed it. None ever will. For while it is the most compelling single area on the Earth's surface, it is not a landscape.

The regal ermine-cloaked Rockies; the somber moss-hung swamps and bayous of Florida and Louisiana; the lush orange groves of California; the sweet clean meadows of the Ohio; the majestic bluffs along the Hudson; the poignantly beautiful prairies of Kansas; the dreamy plantations of the Deep South; the ragged grasslands of the Far West all these and a hundred others offer true landscapes. Each has a distinctive tone, key, spirit, and character which hold true and unique despite their infinite variations. They can be known, loved, and partially expressed.

The Grand Canyon is beyond comprehension. No one could love it. It is not distinguished by any one dominant quality. It is not unique in the individual sense. It is universal.

One cannot define humanity. One can define only the terms of humanity expressed by its many components: tenderness, cruelty, strength, awe, horror, serenity, sadness, joy. But to define life the blended summation of all its infinite aspects - is impossible.

The Grand Canyon in nature is like the humanity of man. It is the sum total of all the aspects of nature combined in one integrated whole. It is at once the smile and the frown upon the face of nature. In its The heart is the savage, uncontrollable fury of all the inanimate universe, and at the same time the immeasurable serenity that succeeds it. It is creation.

Never static, never still, inconstant as the passing moment and yet endurable as time itself, it is the one great drama of evolutionary change perpetually recapitulated. Yet the Canyon refutes even this geological reality. In its depths, whole mountains contract and expand with the changing shadows. Clouds ebb in and out of the gorges like frothy tides. Peaks and buttes change shape and color constantly in the shifting light. It is a realm of the fantastic unreal.

If I were forced to describe so sublime an immensity, I would define it with only one word, the ancient Sanskrit word for the nonexistent material world of the senses: maya, or “illusion.” It embodies all that man has ever achieved of the knowledge of reality: that all matter, as our own science now suspects, is but a manifestation of that primordial energy constituting the electron, whose ultimate source is mind, and hence illusory and insubstantial. The Grand Canyon seems such a world. A world whose very mountains are but the shifting, dissolving, re-created thoughts of the One Omnipotent Mind.

It is beyond sensory perception. It lies in the realm of metaphysics the world of illusion. Maya.

No one is ever prepared for the Canyon as one is for the gradually rising Rockies upon approach across the plains. One simply crosses a flat plateau hirsute with cedar and great pines, and there at foot level it suddenly yawns.

The Rocky Mountains upside down; an immense intaglio instead of a cameo. A mountain chain, as it were, nearly 300 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, but a mile deep instead of a mile high.

Actually the chasm is so long and wide that it has prevented the migration of animals to and from the forests on each side. Only on the Kaibab Plateau to the north are found the Kaibab white-tailed squirrels, the only species with ear tufts in the world. Parachutists have been dropped on certain buttes to search for prehistoric forms of animal life possibly isolated in the Canyon. In this largest virgin forest in the United States roam queer dwarf burros which have strayed here, gone wild, inbred and become stunted. The North Rim abounds in deer. A government trapper killed five hundred mountain lions in four years.

Winding down to the bottom are two easy horseback trails, Hermit and Bright Angel. Descend one of these and the third dimension of the Canyon begins to be apparent its appalling depth. A sheer drop of one mile from the South Rim, and 1,300 feet more from the North Rim. Remembering that one mile in altitude is comparable to 800 miles of latitude, you can travel here the equivalent distance from central Mexico to northern Canada. It is a trail that drops from a snow-storm at the Rim into semitropical weather at the Colorado River below. And one which leads through all the zones of plant life from the mesquite of the Lower Sonora Zone, through the upper Sonora and Transition, to the quaking aspen of the Canadian Zone.

In length, breadth, and width the Canyon grows. Its mere immensity takes hold. Yet these dimensions are but its frame. Like a drug, the more of it you take in, the more you want. Often, riding through the forests along its Rim, I have come across lone wanderers held there a month, a year, a life-time, by nothing more than its strange and indefinable quality of compelling fascination. Ostensibly there are vacation-ists and invalids, photographers and artists, sheepherders, old hunters and trappers even a crackpot waiting for the world to come to an end. But it is the Canyon that holds them.

What is there in it that exerts so universal an appeal? For one thing, it contains every shape known to man. Lofty peaks, whole mountains rise out of its depths. There are vast plateaus, flat-topped mesas, high buttes, and monoliths. And all of these are carved in the semblance of pyramids, temples, castles; of pinnacles, spires, fluted columns, and towers; porticoes and abutments, bridges and arches, terraces, balconies, balustrades. They are solid and fragile, bare and covered with lattice-work and delicate carving. It is a stage that seems expressly built to contain in perpetuity appropriate sets for every dy-nasty, every religion, every leg-end, and myth-drama that man has known a vast universal depository, as it were, of man-kind's structural and architec-tural heritage.

What shape or form has man ever conceived of mind and built by hand that the Can-yon does not hold? Is that its secret which holds a watcher at its brim to see foretold in it the yet unborn form of his wildest imagining, the shape of his secret longing?

The Grand Canyon

Why, many a man has hard-ly noticed shapes in it at all. They are merely blobs of color. Color so rich and rampant that it floods the whole chasm; so powerful it dissolves like acid all the shapes within it. Here is a drama whose characters are colors: the royal purples, the angry reds, the mellow rus-sets and monkish browns, soothing blues, shrieking yel-lows, tragic blacks and mystic whites, cool greens, pale lav-enders, and anemic grays.

A lifetime is too short to watch their infinite variations in key and tone. They change with every season, every hour, and with every change in light and weather.

In the blinding glare of a summer's noon, its tints are so muted that the Canyon seems a delicate pastel. But watch it at sunset. The yellows slowly deepen to orange; the salmon pinks to reds; the greens and blue-grays to damson blue; the lilacs to purple. Sunrise re-verses the process. The whole chasm lifts bodily, inch by inch, toward light. The paint pot tips and spills over. The colors run and seep down the walls, col-lecting in pools below.

If it is a picture, winter frames it best. Preferably after a heavy snowfall when the plateaus are solid white, and better yet when every twig and needle is still sheathed in ice. Deeply inset in such a frame, the Canyon has all the warmth and color of a child's stereopticon slide held Up to the table lamp. Into it snow never descends. A sum-mer rainstorm is more potent. Then mists and clouds are formed below. Like tiny puffs from Father's pipe they spurt out of the warm canyons and swelling like balloons gradually float to the surface.

But the cold, clear, cloudless days of October that is its time. Its colors stand out flat and positive. They relate it, not to the universal but to the earth in which it is set. Red Supai sandstone, the rich red rock with the Indian name, the bright red Indian earth that stains land and river alike and gives both their name. Green Tonto shale, green as pine and sage, bright as turquoise, clear as the turquoise sky above. Red and green on limestone white. These are its distinctivecolors as they are the colors of the old Hopi ceremonial sash-es, the masks of the giant Zuni Shalako, the Navajo weavings, the fine old blankets of Chimayo, so faded with their lost and un-duplicated colors.

colors as they are the colors of the old Hopi ceremonial sash-es, the masks of the giant Zuni Shalako, the Navajo weavings, the fine old blankets of Chimayo, so faded with their lost and un-duplicated colors.

In this, of course, I must own to a sentimental but helpless preference. This is my land, and to it I belong with all it express-es and with all by which it is expressed. It is merely a matter of vibration. We are each keyed to that band of the spectrum that determines our own tone.

Little wonder then that the Canyon is universal in appeal. It is the complete spectrum, and in its vast range there is no one who does not find his own harmonic key. Color is a mys-terious thing. Within the writ-ten memory of man, as we know, there was a time when he could not distinguish be-tween the blue of the sky and the green of the forest. Still today there are colors not all of us can perceive. But they are there in the Canyon a thou-sand gradations invisible and unnamed, yet each vibrating upon our consciousness. Is this the "music of the spheres" that fills us so with wonder, a celes-tial symphony of color that drives us to still another termi-nology to express the inex-pressible feeling it evokes?

In an instant, the whole thing is forgotten when suddenly after midnight a slash of light-ning rips through the dark. One hears the bolt strike. It is as if it has cracked the hinge of a canyon wall. A cliff caves in. It tears down another, and it another, like the collapse of a pack of stacked cards. A tremendous and prolonged shattering, accompanied by a thunderous concatenation traveling down the whole Canyon. Before it is over, you have thrown off your blankets and raced half-naked to the Rim. This is the end of the world as predicted by the crackpot. Bolt after bolt strikes into the gorge. In the hot dry air, sheets of flame light up the crumbling buttes and peaks. A second later

The Grand Canyon Vermilion Cliffs to the north, Cedar Mountain to the east. Red Butte to the south. All the rest has been swept away

by the great red river as it cut the Canyon.

As they have vanished, swallowed by a vacuous immensity of flame red and pitch black. It grows greater and greater to the echo of thunderclaps thrown back and forth from the remaining walls, an inferno bathed in fire, a chaotic underworld. This is the apocalypse, the most awful and most sublime sight you can experience. Before it you cling to a piñon, insensible to self, the shrieking wind, and the lash of rain.

As suddenly, it is over. Overpowering silence breaks louder upon the eardrums. In this monstrous, unearthly calm, the first light of day breaks over the clifftops. They are still standing. And in the clarity of rain-washed dawn, you see a world reborn in the semblance of the old. But new, enthrallingly new!

Such a storm articulates that quality that subtly and powerfully penetrates every other quality and every dimension of the Grand Canyon. Time is its palpable fourth dimension. Yet its effect is indescribable. One can only stand mute and view its geological record.The Grand Canyon is the world's largest and oldest book. It is over 15,000 feet thick, and it contains the history of 2,000 million years. Though its pages are wrinkled, creased, and worn, they are brilliantly colored and beautifully engraved. A few chapters are missing. But so clearly are the others written that their meaning is revealed without break in continuity.

Such is the Grand Canyon - 15,650 feet and more of rock pages; pages of light gray, white, dark red, vivid green, blue-gray, bright red, brown; pages of coarse sandstones, fine-textured limestones, shales, rough conglomerates, quartzite, sturdy gneiss and granite. Never smooth, neatly pressed. But in horizontal layers, in vertical walls, in great folds. Warped, twisted, broken. Laid slantwise to encompass three miles of thickness within a vertical depth of one mile. And finally gouged out and eroded into a geological maze.

What is the story it tells?

For man time goes back no further than the beginning of this geological record when the Earth was still molten but cooling to form its sturdy crust of gneiss and granite. This first Archeozoic era leaves no record of any primordial life for over a billion years, not even a single fossil. But gradually the Earth cooled, atmosphere formed, water vapor condensed into rain, and the surface was eroded down into a plain.

The first chapter suddenly ends. This immense, immeasurable plain sank under the sea. Upon it were deposited the thick beds of sediment composing the Unkar and Chuar groups. First the limestone laid down upon the granite on the floor of the sea. Then the sandstone on its beaches. Finally the shale in its estuaries. For now something else was happening. The Earth's surface was rising again. Uplifted, it shook mightily, with vast distortion-ing shrugs, tilting and faulting the new layer on its crust.

So begins the next great era,