TriumphAnt

On our first full day of this year’s Spring Break vacation, our jet-lagged bodies obviously still required their normal complement of sleep because we didn’t actually wake up until what would have been 11:30 am at home (but was conveniently only 8:30 in Las Vegas).

Our hotel deal included breakfast in the accommodation price. Being an American institution, they offered enough food to stoke a good-sized field hand for a solid day’s work loading hay bales. And being typical vacationers, we not only ate to that standard, we quietly wrapped up a moderate quantity of fresh fruit in napkins to bolster us on the coming day’s drive to the Grand Canyon.

(As they say in the House of Commons, Point of Order. This year, we traveled as a quartet – Offspring was with best friend and it turned out to be an inspired decision. Having someone your own age immediately to hand meant that 14-year old impressions could be both immediate and shared, instead of having to wait until we arrived back home and recollections cobbled together piecemeal. I suspect we’re going to try to make that a regular practice. But for purposes of this blog’s recounting of the trip, please take “We” to mean “We four…” unless otherwise specified.)

The route we took to get to the Grand Canyon was by way of Hoover Dam.

Two words: Hoover Dam. You probably picture a pretty big wall of concrete backed up by a sizeable lake. And you’re quite right – as far as it goes. But Hoover Dam is the largest dam of its kind (called a “gravity arch” dam) in the United States. Its “pretty big wall” consists of 119 million (!!) cubic feet of concrete and its “sizeable lake”, Lake Mead, is actually a 250 square mile body of water fed by feeder rivers and streams whose collective geography covers almost 170,000 square miles of that part of the country. The dam tops out at 726 feet high, and spans the gorge over a 1244-foot length at the top, about half that wide at its base.

Even the Dam’s visitors’ parking garage was impressive. Its concrete has been coloured the same hue as the surrounding rock to minimize its visual intrusion into the setting. And in what is a first in my experience, I found we were driving across a garage floor that was polished to the consistency of a basketball court. As we drove slowly through it looking for a space, our tires squeaked and squealed at every little turn.

Once out of the car, we strolled along a roadside walkway, and partway out onto the dam itself. Leaning over the rail to let your eyes flow from its top to the base of the gorge far below is a sure-fire exercise in induced vertigo, I don’t care how comfortable you are with heights!

What makes the structure even more impressive – at least to me – is the fact that it was built over a period of six years during the depths of the Great Depression, from 1931 to 1937. Many elements of its design, especially in its finishing touches, are beautiful monumental works of art deco.

There is also a very nice contemporary tribute to the dam’s “high scalers” at, appropriately enough, the entrance to the High Scaler Café. High scalers were workers whose jobs consisted of swinging down on ropes over the sheer face of the gorge, first of all to drill deep holes, then to fill those holes with dynamite in order to blast out a smooth rock face against which the dam’s concrete would be joined. A high scaler was just about the highest paid job one could hold among the construction workers. It paid $5.60 per day. Of the 94 workers who were killed during the dam’s construction, 24 were high scalers who fell to their deaths; another ten workers died in the explosions.

The Discovery Channel on TV occasionally repeats a National Geographic series entitled “Frontiers of Construction”, and I have seen the episode devoted to the building of this Dam. Even on the small screen, it makes for awe-inspiring viewing. At the actual site, looking out over the terrain into which the Dam has been built, my impression of the planners, designers and builders begins to lean more toward words like “superhuman”.

Several pieces of the Dam’s artwork, including the bronze of the high scaler, are pictured in this article: http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/artwork.html

Because of the afternoon time we spent at Hoover Dam, it meant that we eventually arrived at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim Village only after dark.

I do not recommend doing this.

Despite the high tourist traffic in the area, there are obvious efforts being made to avoid over-lighting the property. That’s a wonderful thought when you’ve checked in, familiarized yourself with the property and actually know where you’re going. But rolling slowly along the Village Drive, peering at every vague landmark that the car’s headlights managed to illuminate in search of a sign – either directional or actually stuck on a building – to identify “Kachina Lodge”, was an exercise in considerable frustration, not to mention a real test of the limited human capacity for night vision. Finally, we found a spot to park that, as we discovered after prowling about in the dark as pedestrians, was no more than a hundred yards from the entrance to Kachina Lodge. Given the premium on parking spaces in the Village, we nailed the tires to the curb. That car was not going to move until we departed the Grand Canyon.

A sign on the door to Kachina Lodge informed us that actual check-in took place at a building that was roughly the distance of two city blocks away, so we headed off in that that direction. The night was astonishing. The surroundings were dim enough to allow the overhead stars to flood the night sky, even to the extent of rendering the Milky Way clearly visible. Orion, which in Ottawa is easily identifiable, was quite difficult to find in this sky, so filled-in were its famous four corners and belt line with countless other stars not visible in a sky awash in a city’s light glow.

Along the darkened sidewalk, we nearly collided with two people who were standing stock-still, silently looking uphill to the right of the path. As we slowed to work our way around them, we turned our heads and tried to distinguish some sort of defined object in the darkness. Suddenly we became aware that standing not more than about 15 feet away – visible as faintly less dark lumps in the blackness of their background – and apparently looking right back at us, was an indeterminate number of mule deer.

Most Canyon-related brochures include mule deer – so named because of their overlong ears – as being among the most prominent of the area’s wildlife. It was, nonetheless, somewhat startling to encounter several of the timid ruminants right in the core of such a tourist-populated area. That one quiet encounter in the dark turned out to be our only meeting with them, despite a subsequent night’s stroll around the grounds in an effort to rediscover them.

The building where one checked in turned out to be the hub of the South Rim Village. A helpful clerk told us that, if we were hungry (we were), we might want to get our names on the dining room waiting list because he estimated the wait would be about an hour. While my wife checked in, I high-tailed it down the hallway where the entrance to the dining room could be found. After giving them my name, I was handed a thick strip of clear plastic about six inches long. At one end was a rectangular box, which showed a mess of electronics under its cover. That, I was told, was a beeper that would notify me when our table was ready. “Well, does it beep, or buzz, or flash, or vibrate?” I asked, wondering if I could pocket it or would I have to keep it in sight. “Yes,” was the reply. We were also told to be roughly within a 50-foot radius of the restaurant entrance in about 45 minutes to an hour from now when we could expect our table to be ready, because these things had a very limited range.

We had time to unload the car, carry our stuff to our room, then come back to prowl around the gift shop. As I was scanning the t-shirts, trying to decide whether to go dignified with an earth-tone Navajo theme, or opt for a cartoon mule with an “I rode into the Grand Canyon on my ass!” caption, suddenly all hell broke loose deep in my pants pocket. I yanked the device out of my pants (Oh, don’t even GO there!) and sure enough, it was vibrating, buzzing, beeping and flashing a yellow blinking light buried somewhere among the visible electronics. “Yes”, it seems, was not intended to have been a sarcastic reply to my multiple-choice query about how it worked.

After a dinner of near gluttonous volume (we had decided we really had to experience a full scope of appetizer, entrée and dessert), we ambled back to Kachina Lodge. In darkness punctuated only by the occasional softly glowing pathside light, we walked out to a low stone wall no more than 15 yards from the Lodge’s back door. Standing at the wall, we stared off into a void of complete darkness. Thinking I only needed a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the change from the dining room’s lights, I waited. But the darkness got no lighter. Neither did any distant lights appear anywhere along any sector of about a 180 degree field of view in front of me and off to either side.

As the kids headed back indoors to determine whether the TV in our room pulled in The Cartoon Network, I stood and gaped into the void, trying to imagine what was out there.

Such was my first actual onsite encounter with just one portion of the 277-mile long, five to 18-mile wide (10 at the point where I stood), 5,000-foot deep etching carved over the past five to six million years by the 1,450-mile long Colorado River, known by the (woefully inadequate, as I would discover at first light the next morning) name, Grand Canyon.

Up next: Our Canyon stay