TriumphAnt

I think I must have still been running along metabolically somewhere just east of Toronto because, with no help required from an alarm or wake-up call, I woke up about 5:15 am on Sunday morning. At that hour, there was a distinct scarcity of daylight, made all the more noticeable by the near blackout-quality of the heavy drapes drawn across the window. And also in our room, there was a scarcity of lounging-around furniture. So I pulled the bathroom door almost fully closed, leaving a thin crack for light, and sat on the carpet just outside the bathroom, reading for almost an hour.

Finally, by about 6:15 am, I noticed that enough daylight was seeping in around the periphery of the curtains that an early morning walk would actually reveal something of the Canyon. My wife by then was also awake. Our teen co-travelers, however, were sleeping like… well, like teenagers. We had mentioned to them the previous night that if they awoke and found us gone, we were just out for a stroll and had not, in fact, sleep-walked our way over the Canyon rim in the dark.

We had already been fore-alerted to the fact that the Canyon presents its very best face under the glow either of an early morning sunrise or an early evening sunset. (Actually, I suppose “early morning sunrise” and “early evening sunset” are both kind of redundant, given that neither event has happened at any other time since the dawn of humankind… but I digress.) That morning, the cloud-free sky definitely promised a sunrise.

It is no exaggeration to describe our accommodation as being located mere steps from the Canyon – about 25 to be exact. The South Rim’s Canyon Village is perched literally on a sweep of exactly what its name suggests – the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon is honestly something you simply have to see for yourself to fully appreciate. A bit later, I’ll describe a safety lecture by a mule wrangler, but one point he made is worth inserting here: there is no such thing as a photograph that does the Canyon justice. To that I would simply add, neither is there a collection of words that even comes close. As previously noted, the Canyon – where the Village is located – is about 10 miles across and roughly 5,000 feet deep. It was that boundary that framed the vista that greeted us as we strolled to the rim wall (a man-made stone wall about two feet high). And at this point, fully every linguistic superlative in my possession deserted me.

In early morning, the softer light casts an infinite range of shadows on cliff walls and buttes both near and far, imparting both a visual depth and a stunningly rich palette of colours to the hundreds of layers of rock that define the geology of six million years of patient carving by the Colorado River.

From where we stood, the river was not visible. But I was already experiencing considerable difficulty trying to grasp the idea that however wide and how fast it could possibly be, it could somehow have been responsible for creating this massive terran cleft, no matter how many geological epochs have transpired since the river began its work. This carving runs over 250 miles in length but the river has also worked enormous meanderings into its pathway through this rock. When we finally did get to a viewpoint that enabled us to see it, it was a tiny and distant dirty brown stripe. From a mile up, it looked laughably languid. That ribbon wore this Canyon? Pull the other one!

So I’m not going to even try to describe the Grand Canyon. But if you’ve ever harboured a wondering about whether it’s worth the trip – it is. Like we did, go at a non-busy, cool time of year. Spring break is probably ideal. I understand it’s blisteringly hot at the height of summer. The nice thing about Spring break, as these notes will reveal further on, is that we caught the Canyon rim in a completely different mood on the second day of our stay.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On a previous visit, my brother-in-law had taken a day-trip on muleback down into the Canyon. My wife and I had long ago decided that he is a far braver soul than either of us would be should we ever have occasion to visit. But he had told us, even if you’re not going to take a mule trip, if you can possibly find the time to do so at least get over to the mule corral early in the morning when that day’s ride is assembling in order to hear the lecture that the wrangler gives to the riders.

So here we finally were and, as luck would have it, our sunrise stroll had indeed taken us to the corral. When we saw the train of saddled mules being led in, and noted that standing outside the corral was a cluster of bleary-eyed souls sporting yellow rain slickers emblazoned with large black lettering on the back, proclaiming each to be a “MULE RIDER”, we immediately decided to hang around. What followed was a combination stand-up comedy routine and safety lecture. By the time it was done, I’m not sure I could have gone through with the exercise of mounting up, even had I booked a trail ride.

In the Grand Canyon, the mules’ “trail” is a narrow path adhering to the Canyon wall. It follows a long series of switchbacks (points along the wall where the trail reverses direction 180 degrees) over the course of its long descent. At many points, so narrow does the trail become that the rider’s Canyon-side foot appears to be hanging out in space between where he sits, and the floor of the Canyon far below.

Riders are also cautioned to keep their mules close to the mule immediately in front. Apparently a mule likes to remain part of the group when he is on the trail and riders were warned that if their mule found himself falling behind, he was going to sprint to catch up. “And you don’t want to be on the back of a mule when he hits a switchback turn at 35 miles per hour,” the wrangler deadpanned.

Another point on which he was adamant was the need to whack the mule with the rider’s switch. And here he bore down on the animal lovers in the group. “These mules are my life and my source of income,” he began. “I am NOT going to tell you to do something that is going to hurt them.” Mulehide, he stressed, is incredibly tough. As a result, there is no way you can hurt one simply by thwapping him firmly with the switch. But in consequence, it’s also precisely why you have to hit the animal so hard. Apparently, you don’t get their attention if you swing your switch like you’re swatting flies.

To demonstrate, he took a switch and slapped his own leather chaps. The authoritative crack snapped across the corral in the early-morning air. “Now this,” he continued, inverting the switch, “is how the English hold their ‘riding crops’” He paused. “Don’t do this. You have to hold it like a tennis racquet, and you have to swing it hard! Besides,” he concluded, “if the English could do anything right, we wouldn’t be celebrating Independence Day every fourth of July… Anyone from England here?”

He went on about the need to sit up straight, because mules will adjust their load balance with a shake if it shifts too far one way or the other to the side, and about the need to drink lots of water because having riders pass out or throw up due to dehydration was the single most frequent mishap they encountered during their guided rides.

Then he delivered the kicker. They would be stopping at several rest and viewpoints on the trail – both on the downward and upward halves. At every stop, he stressed, “before you do anything else, you turn your mule so his face – and yours -- is looking into the Canyon. Now we don’t do this because we want you to get the pretty view. We do this because a mule, by nature, when he is startled, jumps backwards. So if we’re stopped, and your mule is standing a few feet away from where a small falling rock lands, or God forbid a large one, he’s going to jump backwards. So what direction do you NOT want his butt to be when that happens?”

He continued with his blend of comedy and simple common sense that, when all was said and done, left absolutely no doubt that for all the rules, each rider was in for an incredibly memorable, if occasionally terrifying, day but that they were all in very good hands.

The riders then were nervously matched to mules. The wrangler added that this was not an arbitrary process. He said that had been watching them all during the lecture, and he had a pretty good idea whose temperament went with what mule. “And besides, somebody has to ride ‘Widowmaker’,” he concluded with a wink.

By the time the day ride group was headed out of the corral, I still couldn’t quite fully shake the thought that their bright yellow jackets were solely to make it easier for the rescue helicopter to spot them on the floor of the Canyon.

Once we got back to the hotel room, the kids had awakened and were in the process of doing a little exploring on their own – to discover what channels the room’s TV pulled in. We persuaded them to drag themselves out for a look over the edge. They did so – in their pajamas – and pronounced themselves to be suitably impressed.

Once dressed, they rejoined us adults to make us once more a quarter of explorers and we opted for a ride via shuttle bus out to a place on the rim about 11 km distant called Hermit’s Rest. Interestingly, I have since spoken to people who visited the Canyon several years earlier, and they also took the Hermit’s Rest trip, but by private car. The system now in place has closed the route completely to private motor traffic. But the fact that there is a shuttle every 15 minutes and travelers are free to disembark and re-embark, as often and after however long they might wish at a single viewing point, means that one doesn’t need private transportation to follow a flexible schedule. The shuttle is more than flexibly accommodating.

Along the way, we found one point where two shuttle stops were barely a kilometre apart, so we decided to hike along something that our little tourist map innocuously named the “Canyon Rim Trail”.

I can’t possibly convey what the Canyon Rim Trail section we walked was like, but I have no doubt that parts of it probably made the earlier-referenced mule trail seem like a four-lane highway. My daughter was sporting a broad-rimmed black stetson and, at one point, while she and her friend were happily strolling along blathering away about the latest plot development in one of their shared-interest Japanese anime shows, I shouted back from my position in front – apparently to completely blocked ears – to duck in order to clear a low branch from a tree overhanging the trail. Daughter abruptly became aware of the branch when she clanged into it.

A few minutes later, there was a point where a minor bit of water erosion had nicked a small V-shaped run-off intrusion partway into the path. As I stepped across it, I glanced at the depth of the channel the water had made and suddenly realized that where it ended at the edge of the trail path, what began was approximately 800 feet of clear air began between us and the next bit of visible land far, far below.

I have no doubts the kids would happily have hiked the entire rim trail had we asked them to do so but that was the proverbial all-she-wrote for me. The thought of leading two kids whose attention was happily fluttering along in “I’m on vacation” mode any further on a path that had shown itself fully capable of adding little attention-diverters to its route when one was occasionally no more than half a second removed from a whole lot of nothing but gravity was all I needed to steer everybody up to the nearby rim road instead of carrying on along the right-out-there rim trail.

(I know – “Buck buck bac-CAW!” But the view didn’t go away for our few feet of removal to a paved roadway, and I felt a whole lot better about our collective footing. Plus the only hazard we had to watch for was the passing shuttle bus and its noisy motor gave us a lot of warning.)

Another travel note: take your binoculars. At home, I have a lovely little pair that collapses into a package about two-thirds the size of a pop can. But for all my pre-trip thinking, for some reason (“brain fart” I think is the correct term) the thought, “plan for long-range views” never even made it onto my pre-trip to-do list.

It was at one of the many points along this route where we got our first view of the river responsible for all this magnificence, and where we also paused at a monument to the ill-fated Powell Expedition, a ten-man group who apparently were the first whites to travel the Canyon from beginning to end. Along the way, they met water wilder than anything they had planned for, which wrecked two of their boats and wiped out no small portion of their provisions. In consequence, they came close to starving. Overall, Powell lost four of his expedition along the way, one who simply decided partway through the Canyon that he’d “had enough of the adventure” and dropped out after a month when the expedition stopped to visit some friendly Canyon-dwelling Unita Indians. The three others left the expedition in disgust together, sadly just a day before the others unexpectedly reached their goal. Climbing out of the Canyon, apparently they were killed by Indians in a reprisal killing when they were mistaken for miners who had raped one of their tribe’s women.

As one brief synopsis of just one of the published versions of the story (“The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons”, by John Wesley Powell) captures the three harrowing months: “On May 24, 1869, ten men in four boats pushed off at Green River, Wyoming. On August 30, six men in two boats down to their last ten pounds of moldy flour, fifteen pounds of dried and re-dried and re-dried apples and a few pounds of coffee, came out into open country at the mouth of the Virgin River - blackened, bearded, emaciated, in rags - and saw three Mormons and an Indian seining for fish in the shallows.”

In an unintentionally hilarious typo to wrap up this synopsis, the bookseller adds breathlessly, “This is a griping tale of the first trip down the Colorado River.”

Small wonder!

As the day wound down, we four took an evening stroll once more along the Canyon rim walk (NOT the trail) that ran behind our accommodation area. The growing overcast, unfortunately, pre-empted any hope of a sunset, much to the disappointment of the busloads of tourists who were collecting around the observation area behind the main building and restaurant.

As we moved towards the clutch of short-term Canyon-watchers, we noted that a great many of them were Japanese high schoolers, complete with school uniforms of grey trousers / skirts and jackets, and a white shirt / blouse, topped off with a plain necktie for the boys. My daughter and her friend are big fans of people and things Japanese, even to the extent of earning high school credits by taking language classes every Saturday morning throughout the academic year. It was at this point that I cemented my status as embarrassing parent when, as we proceeded through the group, I gave a small cluster of them a cheery wave and said, “Ohio!”

Their reaction was to wave back and burst out laughing. (I had recalled from our houseguest Hikana’s visit last summer that “Ohio” was a form of greeting.)

But as we cleared the group of visitors from afar, our two mortified teenagers made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that “Ohio” is correct until noon. It means, “Good morning”. “Konichiwa” is apparently the Japanese “Hi howareya?” that is valid all day.

We ended the day by visiting several of the local souvenir stores. While I was waiting outside one for the representatives of the female gender in our group (in other words, everybody but me), who were inside shopping for turquoise earrings, I noticed some birds circling high over the Canyon in such a way as to be backlit by the last few fading bits of day-end glow from the sun as it settled behind the clouds. I recalled my brother-in-law’s telling me that he and his family had actually seen condors on their visit.

These birds were close enough that, at first glance, I knew they were the ubiquitous Canyon ravens. But as I looked closer, I noticed that among them were two massive soaring birds. (Being an Air Force brat, I immediately drew the metaphorical comparison of two bombers flying under fighter protection. Certainly the size difference helped suggest the image.) One of the store proprietors was a few feet away lowering the US flag from the store’s flagpole and I asked her what the larger birds were. “That’d be your condor,” she replied.

I told her of my brother-in-law’s experience on his previous visit and how lucky I felt that we were to catch a glimpse of the rare creatures. She confirmed that “rare” was the word for it. The two we could see were a part of a total Canyon condor population of some 34 birds, and her husband was involved in the census and banding of newborn condor chicks. Fortunately, the earring shoppers emerged in plenty of time to also watch the pair soaring along on the Canyon’s updrafts – they never so much as flapped a wing the whole time we watched them – eventually disappearing into the distant day-end haze somewhere far into the gap between north and south rims.

The next morning, my biology was still running on Ottawa time because I awoke at 5:15 am. Outside, it was still dark, so once again I did my bathroom-as-reading-light routine until deciding a Canyon rim path stroll in the dark in order to catch the sun’s very first nudge into the Canyon might be fun.

As I stepped out the door, I realized instantly that this would not be a sunrise morning. The previous evening’s clouds, in fact, had actually been harbingers of something considerably more than simple overcast, because the whole area was now blanketed by a 3 – 4 inch overnight snowfall! And more was falling as I watched. I was obviously the first one to be making the stroll this morning because I noticed I was leaving footprints on a completely pristine pathway.

It was eerie, and a little reminiscent of my first night’s experience standing by the wall staring off into the nighttime void. Except this morning the light values of the void moved progressively from black to very pale grey. But void it was. Had not the pathway and immediate Canyon rim been clearly visible, I might as well have been standing on the East coast shoreline somewhere around Cape Spear, Newfoundland, waiting for a break in a “pea-soup” fog.

But it didn’t take long for things to begin to clear up. Soon, breaks began to appear and it became apparent that the storm’s cloud line was right flush with the top of the Canyon. Through progressively wider gaps, I caught an occasional glimpse of a nearby butte or even the North rim, but because of the surrounding cloud, the land – whether near or distant – always appeared as a floating island in each random opening in the clouds.

Once again, my wife awoke long before our teen co-travellers and together we walked through a literal winter wonderland. For the next hour or so, the cloud progressively went away entirely, leaving a Canyon awash in new definition as the layers in the cliff walls were delineated even more clearly by the white strata of newly fallen snow. The trees and shrubs clinging to the rim or to Canyon walls also took on completely different appearances. No wonder, I thought, that so many artists and photographers find a lifetime’s inspiration in a setting like this. It’s a place whose mood can change seemingly with each new hour.

Today was also moving day, but the overnight snowfall left me wondering about the driveability of area highways. Checking with a local news channel, we were astonished to watch coverage of a huge freak winter storm that had dropped a staggering two feet (!) of snow on Las Vegas and closed the very highway we had travelled when we left the city to come here to the Canyon. However, we were headed east and the storm’s track had carried its worst weather not far to our south. Driving to our next destination, at least, was not going to be a problem.

Before we bid a final adieu to the Canyon, we made one more stop at an observation point called the Watchtower, which appears in a stunning photograph here: http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np-image.grca0706.html and here are some whats and wherefores about how it came to be:
http://scienceviews.com/parks/watchtower.html

Despite looking like something ancient or, at its most recent – medieval – that Peter Jackson might have set atop a mountain just north of Helm’s Deep in his second Lord of the Rings movie, the Watchtower was actually built in 1932 and intended from the get-go to evoke, rather than recreate an architecture common throughout the area. It is a marvelous pause, and its view of the Canyon’s eastern end also overlooks a broad bend and a delta of the Colorado River where the area’s oldest human habitation remnants (to date) have been found. Its interior includes flights of rough stairs that line the inner walls and travel up some five storeys to an enclosed observation level. Interior decorations evoke petroglyphs (drawings on stone walls) and millennia of native mythologies. Once one gets away from the ubiquitous souvenir section on the main floor, one almost feels as though the place should be approached more like a shrine than like a tourist port-of-call. On warm, non-windy days (today, sadly, was neither), there is also an outdoor observation platform that is open for a truly panoramic overlook of this part of the Canyon and, far beyond to the north, The Painted Desert.

It was a perfect place for our final encounter with the Grand Canyon. After a last pre-drive pause (Not for us the “You should have thought of that BEFORE we left!” admonition), we re-boarded our Kia Amanti and pointed its nose east.

Up next: Eastward Ho! Cruise Control! On to Kayenta, Navajo burgers and red dust!