INTO THE HEART OF THE GREAT CHASM

BELOW

EVEN THE GRAND CANYON HAS AN EDGE. MADE OF LIMESTONE AND solid to the touch, the edge lies just beyond the aspen groves, past the shaded, damp places where alluringly red and poisonous mushrooms poke through the leaf litter. The edge spans the horizon, leaving no way for someone to walk around it. Beyond it, the Grand Canyon unfolds. Ravens sail over the threshold, circling above canyons that unravel 5,600 feet below their wings. I imagine that these birds rejoice over their action, that they fly in ecstasy. I am held to the ground while the ravens in front of me trace shapes in the sky at my eye level. The Rim here consists of catwalks, platforms, and arches. I walk out on one of these tapered slabs of rock, getting as close as I can to the ravens. The landscape beneath me looks like a shifting skeleton of the planet, rich with many shapes. A first impression might suggest that the shapes are haphazard, a drunken scattering of cliffs and canyons. But another few minutes of watching reveals a system. Stacks of rock colors repeat themselves at intervals. A cliff, identified by certain contours, flows in and out of canyons, like a person running fingers along a tangled ribbon to find its ends. This kind of land implies that more is hidden down there than a person could uncover in a lifetime.

A WRITER AND PHOTOGRAPHER PROWL THE DEPTHS OF THE GRAND CANYON

THE RIM

But you cannot see the Canyon's finer details and innuendos from this far up. Walk down into it, and you will find rims and terraces and sandstone tables stretching for miles. At the bottom, you will step by seashell fossils on the desert floor, ancient life turned into stone in perfect form. Spend days in one branch of a side canyon - sleeping in its sandstone hollows, drinking floodwater, studying the movements of canyon wrens and the delicately curved spines on a fishhook cactus. Then walk back to the highest rim and look over the handprint of canyons behind you. You will have an inkling of knowledge about the Grand Canyon, a handful of notes. But mostly you will be impressed with a raw sense of magnitude.

I am leaving in a few days to begin four months of travel in the Grand Canyon. At some points, I will be joined by companions. After that trek, I will return for smaller ventures into places missed. This will be done on foot mostly. I'll resupply from caches along the way as I follow summer to fall, fall to winter, and winter to spring.

The purpose is not to cover the length of the Canyon, to walk each of its major side canyons, nor to set records. It is to walk the land, focusing on some of its more exquisite, remote details.

Water, the blade that cut each of these canyons, ranks as the element of consequence here. Water laid these canyons to their depths. It has given the Grand Canyon its unmistakable breadth.

A wave spreads in front of my chest, fanning away and tapping the canyon walls before purling back. I hold my pack over my head to keep it out of the water. I stop and listen. Silence. The canyon swallows the sounds my partner makes downstream. Ahead, the Redwall limestone curves. It curves again in the opposite direction. Then comes another curve as the canyon slices through solid stone. Its walls are fluted and deeply scalloped by floods.

You don't come in here by mistake. The inner passageways of these canyons curve too steeply, lie too remote, for you to just stumble across them. Here, you shiver with isolation.

The name Grand Canyon implies that the abyss consists of only one canyon, a giant crack in the landscape of northern Arizona. Actually, there are more than 600 canyons here, most of them dry, some harboring small perennial streams.

These canyons are tributaries of the Colorado River. Perforating the curve of local plateaus, they fan out like wings from a 280-mile stretch of river, breaking into feathers, then into vanes and tines. Tributaries split in half and split and split again. Counting branch by branch, the canyons eventually number in the thousands. Few of them have names. Fewer have trails. In most, decades will grow between human footprints.

The canyon I'm in now - SBwidens and tightens as if breathing.

Overhead, ellipsoidal bulges of limestone block the sky. Several weeks ago, I watched a flash flood cascade from the rims and enter this canyon, sending a dun-colored mist straight up the walls. The floodwater remains. It seeps cold and clear from springs, spilling through consecutive pools. Some places are filled chin-deep, while others are left with only swollen, damp sand at the bottom.

Boulders, some of them a fine-grained sandstone from four miles away, are lodged in and above the water, carried here by the flood. Where passing boulders have struck the walls, the limestone has turned a powdery white. Above that, a steel gray defines the canyon, and farther up 300 feet over my head the stone has absorbed a red stain from the leaking iron oxide of formations 4,000 feet higher.

The deepness of the canyon and the absorptive color of the walls works the afternoon light into a dimness no stronger than a gibbous moon. I tip my head in the half-light and drink from the canyon floor. No need to carry water.

When I come around a turn, finally climbing from the water and seating my pack over my shoulders, I find my partner. He stands straining to see down from the tip of a boulder. He looks back at me. The way he smiles, I know we have come to another dead end. The boulder, seven feet wide, has wedged into the canyon floor, creating a talkative waterfall below.

We will have to climb. Again.

Another time, and alone, I reached the top of SB Canyon, seeking refuge in its inner shadows. Down into the canyon at dawn, my gear left tucked into the rocks for safekeeping, I followed the deep bucketlike depressions that floods had carved from bedrock. The air, moist before sunrise, smelled strongly of something like freshly cut herbs.

Cottonwood and western redbud trees, monkeyflower, and seepwillow shrubs. I stopped for a while to listen to a spring. A drop of water fell every 15 or 30 seconds, tapping the surface of a pool I could not see. The sound was so private

PORTFOLIO TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY GARY LADD BELOW THE RIM

HERE'S THE PARADOX: ONE OF THE GREAT JOYS OF THE GRAND CANYON is that you can step to the forest's edge at an overlook and seemingly see it all - temples, buttes, inner gorge, river, rock strata - all exhibited in exquisite three-dimension. Yet it also is true that from the Rim you have seen nothing. The Grand Canyon is a powerful physical structure analogous to a great mansion. You can view it from the outside and appreciate its architecture. But only from the inside, below the Rim, can you fully appreciate the Grand Canyon. It's a labyrinth. Within it lie tens of thousands of corridors, rotundas, secret staircases, dungeons, ballrooms, staterooms, boudoirs, chambers, arboretums, parlors, attics, and libraries. Side canyons branch into sub-canyons that divide into channels that lead to ravines that develop on the surfaces of plateaus that lie far below the Rim. No one will ever know it all. No one. Power and coherence. Can such a place possibly be adequately photographed? I don't think so. Photographs can portray shards of the sublimity of the place. But photographs have little success depicting power and coherence. That can be recorded only in the mind and accomplished only by descent down the Grand Canyon's trails, shooting its rapids and sitting quietly in a chamber hewn from rock hundreds of millions of years old.

PORTFOLIO

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 24) The Colorado River tumbles through a maze of boulders at the mouth of North Canyon. (BELOW) Ancient Anasazi granaries hug the steep walls of the Canyon near the mouth of Nankoweap Creek. (RIGHT) The river courses over cobbles in this view upriver toward Nankoweap Canyon. (OPPOSITE PAGE) Royal Arch Creek cascades over the travertine boulders in Elve's Chasm.

Pensive Places in the Canyon

Boulders Accent Canyon Ways A Rhapsody of Colors and Textures

(OPPOSITE PAGE) A still pool reflects sheer walls in the narrows of Blacktail Canyon. (LEFT) Swept downriver by the power of the Colorado, a white limestone boulder rests on a section of black Precambrian bedrock. (ABOVE) A sheltered alcove fills with the bright light of a summer morning.

PORTFOLIO

(BELOW) Slabs of Supai sandstone teeter on the edge of the Canyon's esplanade Views Falling 3,000 feet above the into Eternity Colorado River at Toroweap Overlook. (RIGHT) Spring runoff swells the falls at Travertine Canyon. (OPPOSITE PAGE) A rainbow splits the sky over the South Rim in this view from Mather Point. Summer thunderstorms can highlight the vastness of the Grand Canyon as multiple systems erupt and subside across its enormous expanse.