Below the Rim
On the Grand Canyon
1.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a “hike”. Rather, I was walking mid-afternoon along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, following a paved sidewalk for three miles from Bright Angel Lodge to the Visitor Center near Mather Point. The sun was very bright and shadows cast against the friable ochre-yellow soil between the Utah junipers and the pinon pine were distinct, sharply angular theorems about the intense quality of the light. The sky was intensely blue, horizon to horizon, but the air was cool – it was the end of February and about 55 degrees.
Near the hotels and gift shops along the South Rim, you are never alone. There are crowds at the look-outs and solitary ramblers standing sentinel on the cliff edges. But midway between the lodge and the Visitor Center, I had come to a part of the walk where those ambling along the sidewalk were spaced at about 100 yard intervals. From time to time, I passed groups of three or four young people daring one another to venture closer to the crumbling edge of the abyss than was prudent. I saw the kids on the brink, posing against that vast landscape of red- and green-rock mountains, one after another embedded in that huge fissure so that their pinnacled summits, rising to an immense height above the gorge were still hundreds of feet below the rim. The kids hooted at the peril and took pictures of themselves on the fractured precipice and I felt a little dizzy looking in their direction.
Where the path wound among agonized trees, corkscrewing up out of the stony earth, I heard something puffing, a loud rhythmic wheezing and, then, the shadow of an immense raven was imprinted on the ground, branded so intensely on the soil and twisted tree trunks that it seemed impossible that this mark would not persist long after the bird was gone. The wings beat on the breeze, making a noise like a bellows, and, then, the bird dragging its shadow, shaped as a serrated wedge-shaped scoop, was gone.
2.
Travelers beware! The Grand Canyon will defeat you.
Once, when I was a sophomore in High School (as a recall), someone invited me to a youth-group meeting in Glen Lake, an old suburb about three or four miles from where I lived with my parents in Eden Prairie. I don’t recall the exact occasion – it may have been some kind of Eagle Scout event (although I was never a scout).
Glen Lake had grown up around a sanitarium originally built to house victims of the contagious diseases that once ravaged the country – ailments like tuberculosis and polio. When the sanitarium was built in the early twenties, this place was far from the city, a remote outpost among the fjord-shaped lakes and high ridges mined for gravel southwest of Minneapolis. Of course, the city had expanded to fill in the blank spots in the landscape between the downtown and its first concentric rings of orderly, prosperous suburbs and, when I was a youth, the farms around Hopkins and Glen Lake had been reduced to mere impoverished acreages here and there on particularly steep or boggy land, intractable areas where development would have been too expensive. (Needless to say all of those places have now succumbed to the earthmoving grader, flattened out into preserves of expensive homes and the bogs and creeks are now domesticated into water features.) Glen Lake retained some of the old glacial moraines and there were tree-covered hills with homes built shortly after World War Two nestled among them and, then, of course, the immense and gloomy red-brick hulk of the sanitarium and its power-plant vast enough to light a city with towering, sinister-looking smokestacks.
Glen Lake had a downtown, really just a crossroads with a café, grocery store, a dentist’s office next to a hair salon, a veterinary hospital and a Dairy Queen. I think the Eagle Scout meeting, if that was the context, was either in a church basement or the community room of a branch bank. The conclave was by invitation-only – the notion was that the best and brightest of the young men in the area would gather under the leadership of an older fellow, a mentor as it were, and devise some kind of remarkable project or journey. I’ve never been much of a “joiner” and so I was skeptical of the whole enterprise and, furthermore, Glen Lake and its environs always seemed a little spooky to me. The kids from that community were weird obsessives with elderly parents, the men wounded in the war and the women all alcoholic.
I can’t reliably describe the middle-aged man who led the group meeting. I know that he was renowned for his wit, a local Voltaire by all accounts, mordant and wise. When I picture him, I see a haggard fellow with a long, bluish jaw, horn-rimmed glasses, and the haircut of an ex-marine or, possibly, a small-town shop teacher. (This account likely confuses the speaker at this meeting with a man named Nicholson, the AV-instructor at my High School and a teacher who was universally regarded as the smartest man in Eden Prairie, possibly also the smartest man in the whole Twin Cities. He contracted some horrific disease and died before he was fifty. I recall visiting him in his home where the sickness had immobilized him so completely that he was nothing more than a vast, noble skull inhabited with darting eyes like shrews or tiny mice, a bony prominence rising like a butte above the flat paralyzed flood-plain of a body that was wholly covered in sheets and blankets so that we would not be horrified by his cadaverous physique. He was the first dying man with whom I ever conducted a conversation and, of course, remains an indelible presence in my mind.)
The middle-aged scoutmaster (if that’s what he was) talked about robotics and computers, subjects that were then
avant garde, and, then, paused in his description of the wonderful things that we would accomplish together, to tell an anecdote about his own courage. It seemed that a few years earlier, he had come to the Grand Canyon in Arizona on a warm summer day. He was anxious to test his courage against the vast gorge and so he immediately hiked down into the canyon. It was easy to descend along the winding switchback trails, although it was exceedingly hot, like a march into an oven. As he told the story, he walked vigorously until he had reached the river flowing through the dark rock jaws of the inner canyon. It was mid-afternoon and he wasn’t prepared to spend the night in the gorge. In fact, he had only brought a single canteen of water. Of course, he discovered that the way up and out of the canyon was infinitely more difficult than the fast hike into its depths. The sun was now at its height and the rocks were blazing and there was no shade on the cliff faces where the trail cut back and forth, endlessly switchbacking up against stone walls that radiated heat like stones in a sauna. At some point, the man sat on a boulder and looked down into the great purple hole and, then, gazing upward saw that he had another 2000 feet of vertical ascent ahead of him. His water was gone and he felt dizzy and, sometimes, couldn’t focus his eyes. He was perishing, it seemed, of heat stroke and his heart was lunging irregularly in his chest as if to break through his ribcage. The man decided that he had come to the canyon to die and that there was no way that he could reach the rim.
But, after a few minutes, the heat where he was sitting became too intense (he had forgotten to bring a hat) and, so, his alternatives were either to die hiking up the hill or remain in the oven and be broiled to death where he sat. And, so, he put foot after foot, sometimes stumbling, sometimes staggering, sometimes even falling, but making his way doggedly upward until, somehow, he had come to the scrub-brush at the rim. By this time, it was dark, although it didn’t matter to him because his eyes had gone dim long ago. He found some water at a rest-station on the canyon rim and drank until he could no longer fill his belly. The man said that he would have died but for his determination and it was that kind of fortitude that he was now urging upon us in the study of lasers and home-made rocket ships and radio-controlled model airplanes and IBM computers and the other advanced technology of the day. The whole thing made no sense to me and the man’s elaborate story about almost perishing due to his own folly in the Grand Canyon didn’t exactly commend him as a leader.
Then, the man fixed us with his glinting eyes. We were a monastic group, exclusively male. He said that the chief misery of human life was death. He said that there was so much more to know and learn, so many more experiences that we should seek, but that death put an end to all of this. Death was the tragedy of life. It extinguished what had been built laboriously minute by minute and day by day and year by year. Death snuffed-out the intelligence gained by careful scientific study of the world – it was an awful loss. I felt a little uncomfortable. A whiff of sexual perversion, I think, was in the air. The Eagle Scout leader (if that’s what he was) told us that we should work with him to discover the secrets of eternal life and that this knowledge, although difficult to attain – in fact as hard as climbing from the Colorado to the rim of the Grand Canyon – could be attained. This was, ultimately, the objective of all science and, if we would become his fellow adventurers, perhaps, we could achieve immortality.
It seemed as if the goal was to form some kind of cult around this middle-aged man. This meeting took place in 1970 – that is fifty years ago. Of course, the shadow of the raven has passed over him and the Eagle Scout leader is now long dead.
3.
Sleek and corpulent from feasting, Julie and I left the Grand Arizona Resort in Phoenix and drove north to the Grand Canyon. We had reservations at the Kachina Lodge on the South Rim at a place called Canyon Village. My phone told me that there were two routes to the canyon – one was more direct, highway 64 west of Flagstaff and north through Tusuyan; the other route was longer and reached the canyon after passing through Indian country to the northeast of Flagstaff. There is no completely direct route due to the obstacle posed by the San Francisco Peaks, a massif of three snow-capped volcanos rising about fifty miles to the south of the canyon’s center conserved within the National Park.
The route from Phoenix on Interstate 17 passes through the saguaro-dotted Sonoran desert to a place north of Black Canyon, a snow-bird village in a dismal rock hollow, where the freeway lunges up the huge barren hills to an elevation of about 5000 feet, high chaparral on both sides of the freeway with prospects of mountains with ridge-lines that look like chocolate melted in the heat. At Camp Verde, the highway suddenly drops down into another stony valley, descending, perhaps, two-thousand feet, before the road climbs again, an immense 18 mile grade that tops out on the Colorado plateau, an elevation of about 7000 with bright white patches of snow glittering among the ponderosa pine. Julie wanted to buy a gift for someone, a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt celebrating the Grand Canyon, and so we exited the freeway to drive up to Sedona.
The Sedona film festival was in full-flush and the town, like Taos, an overcrowded crossroads with small shopping centers selling healing crystals and shaman handbooks and all other sorts of New Age paraphernalia, was full of disoriented pedestrians and SUVs with Bernie Sanders decals. We found a parking spot above the creek, a garage mounted on the precipitous declivity dropping down to the stream. It was cool here – about 40 degrees – and very sunny so that the slick red rocks glowed with supernatural vehemence in the clear air. We found the Harley-Davidson store next to an upscale Mexican restaurant, bought the tee-shirt, and, then, proceeded through the interminable traffic jam in central Sedona on the two-lane highway that winds and wriggles through the Oak Creek gorge up to the plateau adjacent to Flagstaff. It was well-past mid-day and so we stopped at the Little America truckstop and motel for lunch – a couple of Hopi waitresses were off-duty and listlessly watching ESPN on a big screen TV in the café; the women were eating big ice-cream cones. Some fat truckers with bad joints creaked through the shop, ignoring the Indian souvenirs and Grand Canyon postcards, to return the keys unlocking the shower vaults from which they had just come – the men had dripping hair and beards. For some reason, this huge truckstop is unavoidable – when you pass through this area, you will always find yourself at this place even if you don’t want to pause here.
On the radio, the corona virus dominated the public radio news shows. People were dying in Italy and the first cases in Nigeria (Lagos) and Brazil had been identified so that it was now certain that the disease would seek out every inhabited place in the world, all of its nooks and crannies. In a month or so, perhaps, even the happy inhabitants of Flagstaff, high in their mountain abode, would be coughing and wheezing with the sickness. We drove out of Flagstaff east and, then, north on 88. The snowy peaks of the San Francisco range reared up like alabaster thrones to our left and black, grisly lava fields pressed up against the road from the east.
The road north to Cameron crosses windswept
altiplano, a vast featureless landscape that defeats observation by its sheer expanse. A gravel road as wide as a freeway – here there is no scarcity of space – drives east to the horizon, passing (I know) huge abandoned pueblos sprawled like eroded, reddish badlands along the hilltops. These are ancestral Pueblo sites, six of them available for inspection, grand communal dwellings 900 years ago, with cylindrical towers, big perfectly round kivas, and, in one case, a sheer-walled ball-court incised into the flat land. Many years ago, when I had more time, I recall visiting the pueblos and would like to pause to see them today, but the shadows are lengthening and clouds drag their grey vestments beneath them across the empty plains and the darkness is already gathering where seeing exhausts itself against the barren rim of the world. This place is vast and the sheer immensity of it seems hostile – so much incommunicative emptiness. I crane my neck to look down the gravel road graded flat and level and spilling away from the highway like a long, wide chute into nothingness – the pueblo ruins are too far away and I can’t see them.
A little later, we see two dogs running frantically in tandem and harnessed together. An Indian is walking along the shoulder of the road, passing a dusty hollow road that runs downslope to a couple bleak government-issue houses, square with metal roofs, where there is a corolla of smashed and derelict cars. Julie is troubled by the dogs. Why running so swiftly? – from where to what? After a quarter mile, we pass another Indian man, Navajo (
Dine) tinkering with a gate that leads to an enclosure where some sheep are gathered. “He must be the owner of the dogs,” she says. “I don’t think so,” I reply. But she is adamant – the dogs must have an owner and the owner must show a modicum of concern for them, some scintilla of worry: “he’s looking for them,”she says.
Cameron, the only town on the road, is the intersection where an east-west highway leads to the Grand Canyon. The place is dispiriting, a scatter of houses dropped haphazardly on the ragged land under a butte entirely clad with broken beer and liquor bottles, nothing like streets, just the square boxes of the houses spilled across the treeless terrain. There’s a gas station that sells pottery and rugs and a school made of the same red brick that was used to layer the walls of the pueblos thirty-five miles to the south, but nothing else.
We turn toward the canyon. The road winds up toward a high-point, a crest beneath another butte that is roughly shaped like a cowboy hat, its sandy brim also glinting with broken glass in the late afternoon sun. From the hill top, a canyon is visible slashing like a zigzag lightning strike across the plateau. The canyon is so extremely deep and unexpected that it looks like something in an engraving by Dore – a huge lightless rip in the brown, treeless wasteland, grey and, seemingly, bottomless. It’s the sort of thing you could stumble upon unwittingly, never suspecting a 2000 foot precipice even ten yards from the brink. There’s no highway-vantage from which you can see into the depths of the narrow fissure. From the height, the rim of the gorge is visible and, at intervals, the hillsides near the canyon slump down to reveal the opposing cliffside, sheer fluted walls that are the color of an old gravestone in a rural cemetery, a waxy cadaverous hue that is utterly without charm, terrible somehow without being in the least sublime.
Along the high places overlooking this dreadful, crooked canyon, the Dine have widened the tribal road to make viewpoints, but these turn-offs don’t really provide much of a vista because they are lined with skeletal scaffolding, derelict-looking booths from which, in high season, the Indians sell their wares so that you would have to wander back behind the row of stalls to look down into that barren, unearthly cleft in the plateau. This afternoon, a cold wind is sweeping off the mesas and no one is selling anything from the stalls and we drive past them, looking through the vacant lathe and pole structures down toward the canyon and the level plain beyond that angular gorge toward a range of snow-capped mountains far away in Utah.
The road rises to an arid-looking forest, stately ponderosa pine with their reddish bark trunks spaced between smaller scrub, not the dense underbrush of a Midwestern woods, but an austere place where the dry climate spaces the trees at dignified intervals so that you can walk among them unimpeded by thickets. The soil is yellow-pink, enlivened by salt-colored deposits of stone. In some places, fragmentary sheets of snow abide on north-facing hills under the sparse shade.
The canyon swings into view as the road twists toward a vista called Desert Overlook. The sky has opened to fling light into the depths of the gorge, which is, of course, not one canyon but a hundred, an enormous striated crater in the earth running from horizon to horizon and complicated by innumerable pyramid-shaped buttes, their pointed belfries and steeples rising just to the height of the chalky-looking rim. The sight is frustratingly familiar – the layers of stone stacked atop one another in colorful vertical array and the blue shadows thrown by the pinnacles across the depths and, at bottom of the red and blue and green terraces, the shark-like jaw of the inner gorge, grey and profound as death. There’s nothing really worth saying about the spectacle – it’s been photographed ad infinitum by eyes and cameras more skillful than the powers of observation that you can bring to this natural wonder, painted, celebrated, made the subject of musical compositions by talents as disparate as Ferde Grofe and Olivier Messiaen; it’s all there before you, but, of course, infinitely remote because there is no practical way to descend below the rim, inaccessible except to the imagination and, of course, the mere imagination is insufficient to such a spectacle.
A round tower, a
Torreon, modeled on the watch-towers at Wupatki, but scaled-up by a factor of three, perches on the edge of the precipice. This is one of Mary Colter’s structures, built to decorate the tourist attraction under the aegis of the Fred Harvey Company, the famous hotelier and restaurant-operator who pioneered the hospitality industry here. Colter’s tower, painstakingly constructed of pale field-stone jigsawed together is suspended on a hidden structure forged from steel, thus, allowing her to build at monumental scale an ostensibly masonry fortification and belvedere greatly exceeding anything the Indians could have erected. The inside of the tower has winding stairs that coil around the pottery-glazed interior. The walls are painted with facsimiles of pictographs and abstract patterns derived from native pottery and its cool and a bit sepulchral inside the structure. Of course, it’s all built atop a gift shop poised on the brink of the precipice. The whole thing takes your breath away, but, in fact, it’s not the view but the altitude – here, you are 7200 feet above sea-level.
From Desert Overlook, it’s another 27 winding miles to Grand Canyon Village where we have booked a room in the Kachina Lodge. The road curves along the rim where the trees part from time to time to afford overlooks into the canyon. The sun is shining now, but not for long – evening is approaching.
The El Tovar Hotel, named after a Spanish conquistador who may have discovered the canyon, occupies a height above a hollow steep-sided channel where train tracks glitter beneath some 19th century platforms decorated with Queen Anne trim, shelters against the lethal sun that is now setting.
Eyeless and mute-looking warehouses stand across the tracks and the opposing ridge, where the El Tovar is situated, is lined with lodgings that look something like the utilitarian dormitories at a low-tuition State college. A driveway tilts up to the rustic
porte cochere of the hotel, a dark heap of logs shaped like a hunting chalet. Signs tell us the “idling” is not allowed.
To access our rooms in the Kachina Lodge, one of the drably functional dormitories lining the hill overlooking the railroad tracks, we must check in at the El Tovar. The place is gloomy with the dark rustic wood that seems to painted in some kind of black creosote – the only significant light within the chalet comes from the gift shops that, of course, must be illumined to attract trade. We decide to eat in the dining room at the El Tovar. The girl at the reception desk is not helpful – she rattles off all sorts of information too swiftly to be understood and hands me a packet of coupons, maps, printed admonitions and warnings with the room keys in a folder beside a white sheet of paper that can be used to charge for amenities. I ask the girl where I can park my car and she seems a bit baffled. Why would cars be authorized to intrude into this elegant 19th century resort? She scribbles a mark on a map and tells me ominously that parking will be difficult but that I should just keep circling until a space opens up for my rental car – she also annotates a map of the environs showing a secret gravel passageway to another parking lot that most visitors will overlook. “Sometimes,” she says, “you can find a place in that area out on the dirt.”
I suggest that Julie go into the restaurant to secure a table – the place is already becoming unmanageably crowded. “I will park the car,” I say optimistically. The hotel’s restrooms are being renovated. Notwithstanding the congestion, this month counts as the park’s off-season. We are told that the manifestly unfriendly girl at the desk can issue you a key to a room near the main lobby where there is a working toilet. Or, we are advised to go down some steps into the utility part of the hotel, among the laundries and pantries, and, then, outside where porta-potties have been installed. Julie elects to use the handicap-accessible toilet near the lobby. I go outside to park the car. To my amazement, the lodges lining the hilltop are edged up against an esplanade that hovers on the very brink of the canyon. The sunset is filling the vast pit with oblique light.
As it turns out, there is no place to park at all. Several huge lots cut into a hillside terrace are crowded with cars, some of them rather dubiously double-parked. The alley leading to the hidden lot is not where the receptionist marked it on the map. In fact, there’s no lane at all – just more cars lining the side of the lot. After circling the lot three times without finding any kind of space, I decide to loop down the hill to where another hundred cars are parallel parked along the edges of the railroad tracks. The one-way loop road crosses over the tracks to the other side of the railroad yard where there are also innumerable cars crammed into every possible space. The sun is setting and shadows take on a sinister aspect. I’ve now driven, at least, a half-mile from the El Tovar lodge and there are no parking places anywhere. My waiting and circling and looping through the growing darkness are taking on a Kafkaesque, nightmare quality. I find a driveway up to the lodges and, of course, every single parking space between the dormitory-style buildings is occupied and the lanes in this area lead to nasty dead ends, places where dump trucks and earthmovers block the way and so I have to back-up against other cars idling in places not meant for traffic. After about a half-hour of spiraling through this congested labyrinth, I find myself beyond the railroad tracks, near a mule-barn and some sort of brick-walled turbine-house where I find a single opening in the impenetrable ranks of cars – it seems that this spot is somehow profoundly illegal but I don’t have a choice and so I angle my car into the awkward space under the parapets of the power-plant.
Exiting the car, the question that now concerns me is how can I cross the railroad tracks, a field of iron bars and grooves about the width of a football field and, seemingly, inaccessible to pedestrians? If I were to follow the loop road back to the El Tovar, this would account for a hike of a mile, perhaps more, in the growing gloom and Julie is waiting for me in the dining room. I cautiously skid down the gravel slope toward the railroad switching yard – it’s empty in the twilight, a barrens of intersecting tracks and switches. At the foot of the gravel slope, I find a ditch wrapped around the slightly elevated rail-yard. But the belly of the ditch is black with mud and water oozed down the hill from melting snow. There’s no place to cross. At last, I find a pathway where a little iron bridge arches over the ditch. I cross the tracks to some concrete landings that I am able to climb to get up onto the one-way loop road as it passes the train depot. But, then, a challenge arises: how to ascend the steep banks to the El Tovar? I locate a trail but it takes me steeply upward to a construction site behind the hotel where fences and deep trenches block my way. I try a couple of other walkways, but they dead end against buildings with impenetrable doors or no doors at all. Finally, I have to go down to the loop road and follow it several hundred yards to the steep driveway up to the El Tovar where a ring of cars is not supposed to be idling and, in fact obediently, not idling, people standing next to their SUVs with worried looks on their faces.
I find Julie and we dine. The restaurant is shadowy and elegant after the manner of the grand dining halls at Old Faithful and Yosemite. Enormous logs span the hall’s ceiling and there are electric candles glinting over white table cloths. Track-lighting illumines several murals depicting, in questionable taste, puberty rituals among the Hopi, Zuni snake-dancers and Navajo women weaving rugs while warriors on horseback gaze across the mesas and buttes of Monument Valley. The murals are painted in warm earth-colors, a bit like the reds and yellows and greens that one might find on native pottery, and the faces of the figures are implacable masks that seem vaguely (and ominously) robotic. The waiters look like extras in a John Ford cavalry movie – grave and dignified Indian women wearing the costumes of French maids,
Dine sommeliers decanting fine wines and single-malt whiskeys into glittering crystal, other Native-Americans pushing dessert carts among the tables where sun-burnt tourists are conversing in low tones.
Despite all of the pomp and circumstance, the meal is lousy – the meat is overcooked and the sauces too bland. The chutney on my pork chop is a tasteless goo all twiggy with inedible stems and bitter leaves, less a salad than clippings from the local vegetation growing sparsely among the pinon pine and Utah junipers. And I can’t enjoy the meal because I fear what awaits me: my sense of this place is very inexact and, after dinner, I will have to find my car parked a quarter-mile away in rough terrain and, then, somehow, locate a place to put the vehicle. And we haven’t yet unloaded our bags.
After we have charged the meal (it comes to about 157 dollars including tip), I leave Julie exploring the gift shop and go down the steps to the porta-potties. To my surprise, the turquoise-colored privies are lined up side-by-side like little rigid soldiers, saluting the hotel that they serve, and theatrically illumined by two Klieg lights flooding the toilets with radiance. It’s very dark now, a moonless sky overhead majestic with the braided torrents of the Milky Way, and the toilets are bright as Navajo jewelry, lit like the set of a Hollywood film – it’s strangely majestic but, also, eerie because there is no one outside of the hotel on the black hillside to use the patiently waiting porta-potties and, now, it is bitterly cold with an icy idiot wind ramping up among the pine trees.
Behind the theatrical ranks of the toilets shimmering in the brilliant stage-lights, I find some steps. They are black and hidden in the darkness, but, clutching the railing, I descend to the loop road. Cars are sliding by, skidding sometimes or jerking to the side to avoid hitting the pedestrians, dark-clad and wandering along the parallel-parked vehicles. There is a good chance of being run-down here since there is no light and the loop road is midnight asphalt and the row of parked cars seems to stretch out to a cheerless and vicious infinity. The Grand Canyon is a “dark night”park, a refuge against city glare and light pollution, but, to be frank, I would like my dark way illumined by just a little stray beam here and there, just the faintest trace of friendly light pollution. But the paths are all assiduously dark, the lights at the hotel hidden, the scattered street- and sidewalk lamps dimmed into providing no help at all to the wayfarer.
Once again, I can’t figure out how to cross the railroad yard. I find a way into the field of tracks and side-tracks, the rails stumble-hazards underfoot, but I can’t descry a path out of this maze. At last, I target a single cheerless lamp, 15 watts or less burning against the naked wall of the powerplant. I aim my footsteps for the lamp, reach a point opposite to it, but, then, have to navigate that black ditch full of water and mud and the steep gravel slope where lance-like yucca and agave are growing. There’s nothing to do but forge ahead. It’s so cold that the water in the ditch has frozen solid and the mud is encrusted in ice. The hill is too steep to climb but I scramble upward on hands and knees and, at last, reach the loop road where spills of water have frozen to create more hazards under my tennis shoes. The car is still there – it hasn’t been towed from the awkward, illegal parking place. I get in the rental car, chilled and feverish at the same time, and find my way back through the maze of one-ways to the no-idling zone in front of the hotel.
Normally, I’m too cowardly to complain about difficulties – I tend to assume that any problems encountered were the result of my own mistakes or ineptitude. But this night is different. There is objectively no place to park and I can’t exactly ascertain how this is my fault. (Later, I conclude that if I had preceded more expeditiously to the Park, not pausing to buy a tee-shirt in Sedona or take the eastern route – which is an hour longer – to the Grand Canyon, I might have arrived earlier in the day and found a parking place. But I wasn’t aware, of course, of the hideous congestion at Grand Canyon Village.) The whole adventure on the slopes and crossing the railyard has been simply too harrowing. So I remonstrate with the unhelpful and dismissive receptionist. She is about to turn me aside with some feckless excuse when a German bellhop announces that he is ending his shift and that he can show me his parking place, the last spot in the last and most hidden lot known only to the hotel staff. He gets in a park vehicle and leads me to the Lodge where we unload our luggage and, then, I follow his truck back past the El Tovar, through the completely congested official parking lots and, then, between two buildings where the way is conspicuously marked NO PARKING, a narrow defile that opens upon a tiny gravel alley and, then, a small lot where there is a single space for one last car. And this is where, at last, I park, probably a thousand yards from my hotel room, but a safe (and officially authorized) place to be sure.
The hotel room is small and utilitarian. My sleep is troubled by nightmare after nightmare: I am construing fragments of Mimbres-style pottery, trying to assemble the shards into a parking lot or, at least, a map showing a viable parking lot and, then, the broken Indian pottery represents my psyche and I am trying to rebuild that smashed thing while walking on paths where every street lamp has been dimmed into a sort of aggressive, active, and inter-penetrating darkness and, then, I find that I have ventured too close to the rim and I am falling except that falling is just searching for a parking lot in a maze of canyons and buttes where covid-19 (or is it
corvid?) flaps by on the wings of ravens.
4.
The next morning is clear and sunny with cold winds. We walk to the Bright Angel Lodge, another tourist chalet decorated by Mary Colter eighty or so years ago. A mighty hearth like a geological formation anchors the lobby and a tattered and savage-looking thunderbird is mounted over the fireplace. The thunderbird is the titular “bright angel.” From the rear of the hotel, a trail ramps down into the gorge, descending, ultimately, to the river a mile below. Somewhere hidden in the maze of canyons is another lodge, the so-called Phantom Ranch– it was also designed by Miss Colter, erected at the site in the inner gorge where there was once a tent encampment, the end of the trail for the mule trains descending into the canyon. The descent by mule cost $25 in 1900 (the equivalent of $350 today) and included a sojourn at the Phantom Ranch. Before Miss Colter’s lodge was built from materials laboriously hauled down the face of the enormous beetling cliffs, guests stayed on wooden platforms on which semi-permanent canvas tents, some of them with glass windows, had been pitched. In the tents, luxurious four-poster feather beds were installed. The silence was enormous and the only enemy heat – by mid-May, the temperature at the bottom of the gorge, a kind of mighty oven, can be 110 degrees.
Terry, a name that he pronounced as “teary”, said that we could readily locate him among the other tour bus drivers because “(his) head is bald and (he) has a permanent sunburn”. Terry is the exception to the rule that African-Americans tend to avoid National Parks and anything approximating wilderness. He tells us that he’s been driving tour bus for 10 years and has worked in the Park for 26 years in total, beginning as a chef and, then, a restaurant supervisor, then, driving taxi-cab on the Grand Canyon rim before his present assignment. He’s a pleasant fellow, but a little unwell – he coughs into his microphone and the back of his throat sounds soggy with some sort of infection and, before we return to the lodge, he’s lost his voice entirely. It’s not that much of an inconvenience – his comments on the scenery are mostly conventional and bland. Some of the great tour guides in National Parks are consummate comedians and entertainers in their own right, ingenious poets and orators who have written books and can speak with either incisive wit or lyricism about the landscape and its native people. Terry doesn’t have this gift. He points out a few elk grazing in a meadow and observes some mule deer standing in the melting snow a dozen yards from the rim. We learn that the canyon warms its edges and creates a micro-climate – ponderosa pine stand about two-hundred yards from the brink where it is cooler; the thermals in the gorge warm the rim so that Utah juniper (good for making gin) and pinon pine predominate in that area. Twenty-six breeding pair of California condors nest in the gorge – they are imports, released from a program up at the Vermillion Cliffs near the Utah border and each bird is tagged with a number affixed to its vast wings and a micro-chip. Conservationists have suggested installing an apex predator in the canyon, the Mexican grey wolf, but this plan is controversial.
Terry says nothing about John Powell and the early explorers of the canyon. Apparently, history doesn’t interest him. He also has nothing to say about the Indians who still live in this part of the State. The archaeology of the park doesn’t concern him and he is a little vague about the geology of the canyon. He prefers to suggest that no one really knows how the vast, indurated gorge was produced. (I have the sense that he doesn’t want to offend Mormons or Fundamentalist Christians, or, perhaps, is an adherent to one of these creeds himself.) “Maybe it was made in one day or seven days or seven million years – there are different theories,” Terry says. “You can pick among them whatever suits you.”
One of the riddles of Grand Canyon geology is a missing stratum (or several hundred million years of strata) – this is the so-called “unconformity” in the geological record. Terry explains that the strata are missing due to “erosion” but this doesn’t explain why the rest of the stratigraphic history of the earth is on such voluminous and comprehensive display. “Just remember D-U-D-E,” Terry says: “Deposit, Uplift, Downcutting, and Erosion.” Again this is a formula that explains nothing and, indeed, creates more questions than answers: Deposit of what? Is “downcutting”different from “erosion” and, if so, how?
One of the guests on the tour bus is a National Park employee, a young man with a slightly Hispanic appearance wearing a stylish Stetson, a grey park-ranger coat, handsome with a pencil-line moustache on his upper lip. This guy confers earnestly with Terry at the various overlooks and they exchange notes as to the names of the weeds and flowers billowing up around the chasm. The man in the Stetson is a mule-wrangler, a guide who leads mule-trains down to Phantom Ranch. He tells us that his desire is to be a mounted police officer but these kinds of cops exist only in Yellowstone and, possibly, some of the remote outback in Oregon. It’s his plan to master mule-wrangling and, then, apply for the job of mounted cowboy-cop in Yellowstone – in effect, he wants to be a Federal marshal in the 19th century mold of someone like Matt Dillon on
Gunsmoke. The man is some kind of weird anachronism, but he seems harmless enough to me and, of course, he’s very polite, well-spoken, and, even, courtly.
As the tour continues, most of the guests want to know more about Terry – after all, he’s an anomaly, a Black man in a National Park: Terry tells us he was born in “Pittsburgh, PA.”, went into the military as a mechanic on attack helicopters and served ten years in Florida. After his military service, Terry happened to visit some relatives living in Phoenix. On a whim, the family drove up to the Grand Canyon and Terry was awestruck by the spectacle. He’s lived in the government apartments in Canyon Village for the last 26 years, was married just two years ago, and, now, does most of his shopping in Page, Arizona where there is a Walmart. Flagstaff, he says, is too expensive. A two bedroom apartment in Flagstaff costs $1600 a month – his apartment in the Village in the National Park is $267 a month.
On the interior of the bus, there is a poster that says
Park Yourself Here! This is an advertisement for employment in the park. Seven million tourists come here a year and the park employs a labor force of about three-thousand people – the park, like Yosemite, has its own school district, post office, and federal magistrate. “This is a wonderful place to live,” Terry says. “If you need a job come here and we’ll hire you right away.”
He warns us that a lot of tourists die here each year. “How many?” “It varies,” he says, “ but a lot more than 20 a year.” He pauses for effect: “if you don’t believe me, take a look at the book
Over the Edge in the gift shop.” He tell us: “It’s a fat book and getting bigger every edition.”
Over the Edge chronicles every death known to have occurred in the park during the past century. There is a whole chapter on the horrific mid-air plane collision in 1956 that rained mangled corpses down into a remote side-canyon ten miles from the Village – 126 souls were lost in that crash and crews spent weeks collecting fragmentary bodies, bagging them, and helicoptering the remains off the blistered terrace where the two planes crashed under the North Rim. On average, heat is most likely to kill you in the park although cars collide and motorcycles get run over and, of course, people fall into the canyon and are smashed to pieces on the rocks. The river rapids drown several people a year – the river is 42 degrees year-round despite the nightmarish heat in the inner gorge and you can perish of hypothermia when the air above the river is 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Interestingly, the demographic most likely to perish in the boiling pit of the canyon is single males between 18 and 35. These guys heedlessly hike into the gorge without any water. There’s no shade in the massive ovens of baking rock and the climb up is infinitely more difficult than the amble down into the depths and, so, heat stroke kills these men or cardiac arrest leaves them face-down on the upward scramble, an obstacle for the slow but steady mule trains descending into the canyon. A helicopter rescue with concomitant air ambulance to Flagstaff costs $50,000 and it’s not getting any cheaper.
Twice, Terry has seen a mountain lion, once in pursuit of a fleet, panicked mule deer. He pronounces the word “carrion” like “car iron”. The condors he says are great “car-iron eaters.” But hunters killed the prey with lead shot, something fatally ingested by the massive birds. “They are prehistoric,” Terry says. “Their wing-span is as wide as this bus.” Sometimes, you see them, Terry says, riding thermals miles away over the jagged buttes and side-canyons – they look as little as the ubiquitous ravens at that distance. You will need binoculars to appreciate their true size.
From several vantages, we can see the Colorado river slicing through the gorge. The river glitters in the sunlight but the water looks syrupy, the color of chocolate. Terry says the river is brown with sediment because of recent rains and the melt-off of the snow atop the rims and because upstream some water has been released at the dam, a surge engorging the river and dying it dark-brown.
5.
What is down there? From ledges, explanatory signs point out the deep, fissured formations of Vishnu Schist, the maw walled with Zoroaster Granite, the Coconino sandstone rising as a pedestal for the Hermit and Bright Angel shales, the high white ramparts of Kaibab limestone like crumbling ceramic adorned with embedded molluscs and trilobites. Little metal tubes make sight-lines to the various geological formations, funneling your vision toward one landmark or another – but, at first glance, the striped guts of the canyon are a chaos daunting to both eye and mind, incommensurate with the imagination and, therefore, monstrous.
And, of course, from the rim, you see only a part of that immensity of gorges crisscrossing under the colossal shields of the so-called “temples,” the arrowhead-shaped buttes that stud the river’s excavations. These shields of rock, flattened by perspective, screen other deeper and more cavernous gorges. What creatures are hiding in the abyss? What cities and villages are concealed by the towers of eroded stone? What are the industries of the canyon? Where are its ruins, sources of freshwater, hidden trails and byways? What history is revealed in those depths? Where its cemeteries, battlefields, monuments? The eye loses itself in immensities of space and time embodied in layers upon layers of rock.
Below Bright Angel Point, gold and silver mines once gnawed into the canyon walls. An uranium mine seeped radioactive toxins down the huge tongues of rock-slides lapping down into the inner gorges. Tram-line towers once studded the cliff-sides – except for a few metal rivets they are gone now. A canyon overlook shows scores of switchbacks tracing a path down into the gorge, half-mile long grades slashed diagonally across the rock face to end in steep pitches where the trail, a pale line inscribed in red and green stone, suddenly writhes and doubles back on itself, wriggling down the sheer face to reverse itself on the landing of another less steeply sloping stone ramp. Two-thousand feet below, the trail emerges from the green side-canyon, vanishes into a scrub-brush, the so-called Indian gardens and, then, appears once more on flat terrace, slashing a straight line toward the inner canyon where the walls are so sheer, even overhanging in places, that further progress seems wholly impossible – and, yet, I know that the trail somehow slips down off the promontory below and reaches a suspension bridge over the Colorado, invisible from the rim but somewhere downhill from the Phantom Ranch, a site that also can’t be seen from above. The terrace promontory, in this weather, is moss green except for the razor-slash of the trail and that terrace extends toward the inner gorge like the flat paw or foreleg of a mighty sphinx. Every vantage looking down into the canyon on the South Rim exposes a view of this sculpted stone fore-paw marked with the arrow-straight trail – it must be a mile long – crossing the terrace to vanish into the shadowy jaws of the inner-canyon.
Of course, the canyon offers inducements to descend below the rim, to stroll down the Bright Angel trail below the lodges and gift shops and the photo-studios perched overhead on the cliffs crowded with tourists. Why not go down a few hundred yards? In mid-afternoon, the side-canyon cradling the trail looks cool and shadowy. It’s seductive to think that it’s just an amble to the bottom.
But if you go down there, the canyon owns you. And, then, you will be lost.
6.
The white-washed and airy rooms of Fred Harvey’s Hamburgers (formerly the Bright Angel dining room) are full of hikers. In the morning, people are excited about their descent into the canyon. Oddly enough, the most enthusiastic hikers seem to be wiry-looking retired couples, bony men and women wearing expensive Patagonia gear armed with walking sticks that resemble the poles used by cross-country skiers. These couples wear dark sunglasses and carry elaborate backpacks and you can overhear them planning their descent into the canyon via the Bright Angel route or the Kaibab trail. Later, in the evening, you will see them again, none the worse for wear, crowing to one another about “two hikes in one day”, tossing back bottles of beer and immensely pleased with themselves. Their pride and confidence makes me want to be one one of them, but who am I fooling? -- these are the elite, the shock-troops of the elderly, those who are well and who are now being rewarded for a life-time of yoga, jogging, parsimony, low carb dieting, keeping tabs on muscle-fat ratios, dining on sprouts and leaves with nuts sometimes interspersed, the wise and the virtuous who have survived to entertain themselves in their old age with jaunts into this horrible canyon.
Really, I think to myself, I must go down there – if only for an hour or two hours. Haven’t I walked my dog faithfully for many years?
7.
Fred Harvey, the namesake for the upscale hamburger-joint on the rim, was an industrious and hard-nosted Englishman, one of the “bulldog breed”, who made himself with wealthy by feeding and housing travelers making their way to the golden lands of California on the railroads penetrating the old Southwest. Rail lines like the Atchison, Topeka,and the Santa Fe were built around the time of the Civil War and these roads preceded any reasonable infrastructure. Travelers crossing the mountains and inter-mountain basins were confronted with filthy lodgings and nauseating, over-priced provisions in the wretched cafes at whistle-stops. West of Topeka, you slept with fleas and other vermin and dined on rancid mutton – of course, spiritous potables were always available. Harvey realized that these accommodations were grossly inadequate and, so, he built an empire of clean hotels and hygenic dining halls in partnership with the principal railroad lines in the area.
Harvey was an immigrant from Liverpool and, initially, worked as a pot-scrubber and bus boy in New York City. He was ambitious and founded several restaurants in the East and Midwest that all, ultimately, failed. In 1873, when he was forty, Harvey made a handshake deal with Charley Morse the proprieter of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail line. Harvey was given a concession to develop dining cars, railroad-stop hotels as well restaurants at stations on the way west. The business proved to be immensely successful and Harvey later expanded into other facets of the tourist industry, including building souvenir shops and markets where the local Indians could sell their wares.
Ultimately, Harvey’s business owned 47 restaurants, 15 hotels, and 30 dining cars along the rail routes from St. Louis to Los Angeles. One of Harvey’s innovations was the development of an army of young female employees, the so-called “Harvey Girls”. These young women were recruited by the company to serve as housekeepers and waitresses as well as cooking staff in Harvey’s hotels and restaurants. Each woman signed a contract that she would refrain from marriage during the first year of her employment – marriage thought to be inimical to labor in the work place for women at that time. The girls were given lodging in clean, if crowded, dormitories, chaperoned by older ladies, and dressed in sleek, figure-fitting uniforms with little caps like nurses. The enterprise, paradoxically contributed to the liberation of women from their home-towns, exposed them to the wider world and its denizens, and was an important coming-of-age adventure for generations of girls between the1870's and the post-world-war baby boom – the Harvey girls couldn’t survive real, and organized, women’s liberation and the enterprise ended around 1960,but not before spawning a famous movie musical,
The Harvey Girls (1946) starring Judy Garland and Angela Lansbury. (And featuring an Academy Award-winning song based on the singularly euphonious name of the railroad: “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”)
Harvey’s signature product was his 15 cent ham sandwich. This is reflected in two competing stories about Fred Harvey’s death in February 1901. In the company version, Harvey delirious on his death bed cries out “Don’t cut the ham so thin, boys!” In the unauthorized version of the anecdote, the dying Harvey shouts: “Boys, slice the ham thinner.”
Corporations don’t die. Harvey’s business persisted under his name until 1968, when the hotels and restaurants were bought by the Hawaiian corporation Am Fac. A year ago, management of the concession at the Grand Canyon’s south rim changed the name of the so-called “Bright Angel Dining Room” to “Fred Harvey’s Hamburgers.”
9.
Two pedestrian bridges span the turbulent Colorado within Grand Canyon National Park – these are the so-called “Silver Bridge” below Phantom Ranch and the “Black Bridge” on the Kaibab trail. Both bridges are silken-looking strands of steel laced cliff to cliff across the river in the inner gorge. There is only one highway crossing – the Navajo Bridge four miles upstream from Lee’s Ferry on US 89A. Lee’s Ferry is north of the turn-off to the Grand Canyon National Park at Cameron in the Navajo Reservation.
Lee’s Ferry, a place where boats once hauled passengers and freight across the river, is on the Utah Border and was once a remote and dangerous place. John Lee, the proprietor of the Ferry, was a Mormon pioneer, polygamist, and one of the engineers of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre. (In that massacre, Mormon and Indian allies slaughtered members of a wagon train crossing the territory in retaliation for the murder of one of the Saints in Arkansas. More than 120 people were killed – surviving children were parceled out among the murderers and raised as Latter Day Saints.) Lee’s ferry at Lonely Dell was difficult to reach and the ascent up the canyon wall north of the crossing was perilous – wagons had to winched up the spine of barren rock. Lee was a hard man and drove a hard bargain with those compelled to use his amenities and, ultimately, federal troops were sent to arrest him for his complicity in the 1857 massacre. He was tried for murder and executed by firing squad – this was 20 years after the killings.
In 2002, a lead etching was found at the old fort at Lee’s Ferry. The etching, purportedly a testament incised by John Lee, accused Brigham Young and George Smith, the leaders of the Mormon theocracy, of ordering the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This peculiar artifact caused consternation among the Saints since official histories had always been careful to distance Young and Smith from the massacre. Forensic study of the engraving has confirmed its authenticity. (Here, a researcher can dive down into the rabbit-hole of Mormon history, a subject that is incredibly complex and completely fascinating – but I must avoid this temptation: there are many ways to be lured below the rim and study of LDS history is one of the most seductive.)
The only other place where the Canyon of the Colorado can be crossed is 277 miles to West at Lake Powell.
10.
At Taliesin West on a barren mountain terrace near Scottsdale, tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s compound are offered every 15 minutes. Wright began building at the site during the Depression when commissions were failing and his reputation was in decline. Wright detested cities and his architecture was, then, considered an eccentric, agrarian and Midwestern variant on Arts and Crafts themes. Far from being an innovator, Wright was thought to be a difficult anachroniam, profligate with his client’s resources, and designing in a old-fashioned style more appropriate for the turn of the century than for modern America. With his cadre of followers, apprentices who were more like cult-members than students, Wright ventured into the Arizona desert, a place where he could retreat from the snow and ice in Wisconsin, his home-base. Wright had worked in Phoenix earlier as a consultant on the Biltmore Hotel, a resort complex nudged up against Camelback Mountain – Wright designed elements of the lobby and provided advice as to how to implement so-called “textile block” construction. (This involves the use pre-fabricated blocks with intricate floral designs used in the building’s facade.) The Biltmore was complete in 1929 and Wright, who was then in his sixties, felt that Winter in Wisconsin had become oppressive. Beginning in 1935, Wright moved cold weather operations for both his architectural school and offices at Taliesin to Arizona. He acquired desert land for $3.50 an acre (more than 500 acres) and, using the unpaid labor of his apprentices, began construction of buildings on the outskirts of Scottsdale. Initially, Wright’s family and students lived in canvas tents on the site. For many years, Wright’s office, a structure made from Cherokee-red girders and canvas simulating a tent, had no permanent roof –the structure was closed-off from sun and rain by panels of white canvas suspended between angular girders. When it rained, the water sluiced between canvas sheets was conveyed into the adjacent desert by gutters actually inside of the building and beneath the fabric roofing.
Wright, as was his wont, tinkered with the building until his death in Phoenix in 1959 when he was 91. The compound is sprawling – and that term is here used literally. The low-slung buildings lounge across the desert like the box-cars of an eccentric, rusty train abandoned among the saguaro and stony ranges overlooking Paradise Valley – there is a large shed crammed with draftsman’s tables and a palatial residence that is sternly geometric, comprised of a series of tilted girders slung with white papery-looking ceiling panels reflected in modest, if impressively designed, ponds. A boulder inscribed with Indian pictographs has been hauled down from the mountain ridge. Inside and outside are scrambled with most enclosures designed as verandas that open onto the landscape. The entrances to home and office are concealed – you have the impression of crouching to pass through an almost accidental fissure in a field-stone wall. But, then, of course, the space expands creating a sense that your breathing is now unconstrained in the big rooms opening beyond the aggressive compression at the entry. (Wright’s architecture, more than any other that I know, affects your physical habitus; it seems that your posture, your breathing, the angle of your head and spine, are all subtly altered by the spaces that he creates – this is the haptic aspect of his design.) A long auditorium for theatrical events and dance performances is dug into the caliche. It’s womb-red in the guts of the building with slanted pews echoing the Cherokee-red angle-iron structural elements that support the various buildings, forms that are a bit like the struts of a plane or a bridge. The grand piano in the performance hall is embedded in an alcove chiseled out of a low cliff – when its keys are struck, it resounds with a percussive density so that the sound emerges as if from within a cave. There is a garden with an Asian moon gate, boulders jutting from raked gravel and sand, and dragon-heads studding the prows of the buildings – some of them are piped to propane and will spew fire if the gas is ignited. Because of the climate, the structures seem light, almost weightless, walls and girders designed to cast theatrical shadows on the stone walls and floors – of all of Wright’s buildings, Taliesin West seems the most Asian to me. Although this iteration of Taliesin was conceived as a modest and provisional compound with mostly temporary structures, Wright’s
success d’estime at Falling Water near Pittsburgh, Pa., elevated him again to the status of star architect and resulted in the Scottsdale buildings becoming more grandiose. He paid off some of his debt, much of it arising from a lavish life-style that included collecting Japanese prints and European sports cars, and lived like a feudal lord at Taliesin West.
(When we visited, all was not well at Taliesin West. Two entities struggle for dominion at the compound – Wright’s architectural school, the so-called Fellowship, and the Foundation, an enterprise that manages and conserves Wright’s structures. Wright’s building are expensive to maintain and tour fees, as well as donations which are aggressively solicited onsite, are used to repair leaks in the buildings, repair settling foundations, and keep the lights on. At most of Wright’s buildings, the Foundation exercises sole control. But at Taliesin, the Foundation must share the premises with the school and this has led to persistent internecine feuding. At Taliesin West, there are insufficient funds to both operate the architectural school (which has a tuition of $42,000 a year) and maintain the complicated and somewhat jerry-rigged monuments on site. The Foundation operates in the black, although just barely, but the School has never been profitable. In February 2020, the conflict came to head when the Foundation, in effect, ousted the School – the students will be evicted and transferred to Arizona State, unless a solution to the impasse can be found. During our tour, various bigwigs from the Foundation were in earnest consultation with the deans of the School. The tour-guide pointed out the big bosses, men in suits wearing sunglasses, walking at top speed to meetings in the more remote enclaves of the compound.)
It is fitting that strange doves inhabit Taliesin, primping on the paths and emitting strange harsh cries. The doves have iridescent breasts and, crowning their heads, are small floral bouquets of feather, stalks of feather that end in clumps of bright color. When the birds, with their regal deportment, prance about, the crests above their eyes and beak bob up and down. I don’t recall ever seeing birds of this sort. Black and white pictures don’t reveal that the insides of Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature capes were red satin. When Wright was required to testify in a lawsuit, he was asked for this name and profession. He answered with his name and the statement that he was the world’s greatest architect. Later his wife asked him why he had unnecessarily touted his status as an architect. He replied: “I was under oath, wasn’t I?”
11.
Feminism sometimes resurrects forgotten or discredited figures, reviving them as emblems of successful women in professional endeavors dominated by men. Mary Colter is an example of a woman who, although never wholly forgotten, enjoys a reputation now more prominent than at the time of her death in 1958 – and, indeed, I think she is more celebrated today than during her long career as the chief designer for Fred Harvey’s waystations, souvenir shops, and dining rooms. Her exact professional standing remains a bit contested – she was, in fact, a highly gifted interior designer. Whether it is entirely fair to characterize her as an architect is unclear to me. Certainly, she supervised the design and actual construction of some structures, for instance, the ensemble of buildings in Grand Canyon National Park. (These are the principal surviving examples of her art.) With regard to many other buildings, mostly hotels, she was primarily responsible to conceiving the interior decoration of those structures.
Colter was a vigorous woman who was born in Pittsburgh, Pa, but raised in Minnesota in Saint Paul. From an early age, Colter collected Indian artifacts. As a school girl, she had already amassed a fair collection of Dakota Indian ledger drawings and sketches – as legend has it, when an epidemic decimated the population of Minnesota Indians, Colter’s mother, irrationally, seized and destroyed all of her Indian curios. Colter hid the drawings, however, saved them from destruction, and used them as the core of her collection that she began acquiring as soon as the disease-scare ended. Colter attended High School in St. Paul, worked for a year as a school-teacher in Menominee, Wisconsin, and, then, came back to her hometown where she taught mechanical and free-hand drawing at the Mechanics Arts High School in St. Paul. (Near the defunct Rondo neighborhood ripped up for the construction of Interstate 94, the school was one of Minnesota’s first fully integrated educational institution.) Colter taught for 15 years at Mechanics Arts. Photographs show a lean, saturnine-looking woman, a bit homely but with a graceful figure.
In 1901, Colter, then in her early thirties, went to San Francisco on vacation. There she met a friend who had been employed as a Harvey Girl. Colter talked to company representatives about employment, suggesting that she was expert with respect to Indian curios and could help the company source those artifacts. To her surprise, she was hired. Almost immediately, her skills as an interior decorator with a good instinct for Native American
kitsch were recognized. Charles Whittelsly was the Harvey Company’s architect on retainer and he worked to design the de Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque for the firm. The hotel, now torn down, was built Mission style with a courtyard, fountains and gardens. Mary Colter designed interior furnishings for the lobby and dining rooms. In addition, she worked on a whimsical “Indian House” adjacent to the hotel, a place where Native Americans could sell ceramics and textiles from stalls housed in a structure shaped somewhat like a pueblo. The “Indian House” was popular, and Colter’s architectural folly on Native American themes became an attraction in its own right. Between 1905 and 1922, Colter designed the interior decoration at El Tovar and Bright Angel lodge (both Whittlesly buildings) and, then, created a series of follies similar to her work in Albuquerque – the Hopi House, a faux pueblo with three fieldstone stories devoted to sale of Indian handicrafts, the souvenir shop at Bright Angel point (called the Bright Angel Studio today), the watch-tower at Desert Overlook, Hermit’s Rest, another curio shop, also on the south rim, and the interior design at the Phantom Ranch in the interior gorge. All of these buildings have survived, more or less intact, and Colter’s decorating skill, using Native American motifs, can be appreciated in these places. A wide range of other structures built for the Harvey Company have fared less well – buildings along the rail lines from Kansas City to Los Angeles have succumbed to modern times: they have been demolished and replaced, in some instances, with barren stretches of asphalt. Still standing are her interiors at La Fonda in Santa Fe, a couple of railroad coffee shops in Kansas City, and La Posada in Winslow, Arizona.
Mary Colter had plenty of grit. In her fifties, she descended into the Inner Gorge by Tennessee mule to supervise work at the sweltering Phantom Ranch. A photograph shows her peering over the edge of an aerial tram about to be lowered 1500 feet down to the Indian Gardens on the Esplanade. She didn’t marry and information about her personal life is inaccessible or just unknown. People recall that she had an unpleasant personality, was exceedingly difficult to please, drank heavily, and chain-smoked. None of this would be exceptional for a man in her position. But she was a woman and held to different standards. Ultimately, she retired to Santa Fe. She had never made much money, but had enough to live comfortably by herself in a small cottage. Near the end of her life, La Posada, said to be her crowning accomplishment went into bankruptcy and the interior decorations over which she painstakingly labored were sold at auction. The effects that Colter had achieved with her ensembles of Indian facsimiles, the ceramics and wooden furniture, the wall-hangings of Navajo rugs and the blankets were destroyed when the interiors at Winslow, Arizona were disassembled and the art works scattered. Colter was appalled and said that “there’s such a thing as living too long.” Shortly thereafter, she fell, broke her hip, and, then, died.
The Indian drawings that Colter had saved from destruction at her mother’s hands during the long-ago epidemic were still in her possession. Her Last Will bequeathed these ledger drawings of Sioux warriors on caparisoned horses triumphing over dismembered enemies to the Custer Battlefield Museum at the National Park in Montana.
13.
Hermit’s Rest is one of Colter’s intact works, designed under her direction and built to her exacting eye. Like the Watchtower, the structure is, in effect, a whimsical novelty, a folly designed to attract tourists. The compound is located at the end of the Hermit’s Rest road, a narrow lane that unscrolls along the canyon rim for 14 curving miles to the west of Grand Canyon Village. On March 1, the road closes to passenger vehicle traffic and can only be accessed by bus, but when I was in the park, the lane was open and could be driven to its end at the Hermit’s Rest souvenir shop.
As with Hopi House and the Watchtower, Hermit’s Rest is a vastly scaled-up version of indigenous architecture – in this case a Basque shepherd’s dwelling built around a big, soot-blackened hearth where iron pots large enough to cook missionaries are suspended over the dark ashes in the cool updrafts under the flu. The building is an angular ziggurat of field stone stepped up to a flat masonry roof under the shadow of a huge rock chimney. The chimney is as high as a house and strangely arched like the venomous stinger of a desert scorpion. A dozen yards away, a crude arch of field stone is corbeled up to a crooked lintel from which a big mission bell is hung. The stone arch is labeled HERMIT’S REST. The gift shop perches perilously on the edge of the abyss, a place where thermals pour up and over the canyon rim shaking the needles in the pinon pine. Big ravens haunt the agonized-looking trees twisted over the precipice. When I visited, the souvenir shop was cold and the giant hearth, shaped like the Cyclop’s eye after Odysseus stabbed it out, glowers at you and inhales air up its sinus of crooked chimney. Of course, Indian turquoise, books (including several about Mary Colter) and pots are available for purchase. The store personnel are Navajo with dignified demeanor and long black hair.
The unsteady-looking arch next to the parking lot harboring the big rotund bell is a good place to have your picture taken. People ask about the hermit. There was a shaggy-bearded Canadian who lived below the rim here with a French-sounding name, Louis Boucher. Pictures show him on horse-back. But before the National Park bought up the concessions here, the Canadian operated a group of tourist cabins near the rim. So, of course, he wasn’t a hermit at all. The notion of the hermit and his rest is fanciful – a Harvey-company legend manufactured to pique the interest of tourists.
14.
Mary Colter may be regarded as a designer of
faux Indian ruins, architectural follies like those dotting the Arcadian landscapes made by the great 18th century landscape architect, Capability Brown. But, in another sense, it is worth comparing her buildings to the architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. This comparison may seem heretical, even blasphemous, but I think it is apt.
Both Colter and Wright propose an egalitarian, that is, popular architecture – good buildings should be available to all people regardless of social rank or wealth. (Wright’s Usonian buildings were conceived as mass-produced versions of the houses that he designed for the elite; Mary Colter’s structures are made for the public traveling by rail, lodgings and souvenir showrooms built for the masses.) Both the famous architect and the commercial interior decorator insist upon total, integrated design: Wright’s houses come with furniture, crockery, rugs and, in some cases, Japanese woodcuts. Colter and Wright embed their structures into the landscape and build with native materials – they espouse “natural ways” of construction that are suitable for the environment in which the building is located. In this regard, their buildings express a romantic sensibility, that is, characteristic of the American West – Colter’s structures invoke ruinous adobe together with pioneer ingenuity; Wright’s “prairie-style” is the embodiment of the American landscape of the Midwest. Of course, Wright drew inspiration from Native American building styles – the friezes at Hollyhock House have a Central American inspiration (the place looks Aztec) and one of the Wisconsin architect’s first structures was his “Mayan Temple” warehouse at Richland Center, a building with a profile that rhymes with the shaggy jungle-covered hills of the southwestern part of Wisconsin. Taliesin West is rife with Indian themes – visitors are greeted by a boulder inscribed with petroglyphs. Colter’s trademark structures (the Lookout Tower and Hopi House) are enlarged versions of Native American vernacular buildings. Comparisons can be multiplied. Both Colter and Wright were difficult people, lived long lives that began during the period of Westward Expansion and ended in the late nineteen-fifties: Colter died in 1958 while Wright outlived her by a year. Both were products of the upper Midwest. Most likely, Wright knew nothing about Colter and, probably, Colter had no interest in Wright. There is no evidence that the two ever met.
15.
Here is an odd spectacle: I have walked about a mile from the El Tovar Hotel along the rim of the canyon. Four women encircle an ancient Utah juniper growing about twenty feet from the rim. The women are attractive and seem to be in their mid-thirties: they have long flowing hair and are wearing expensive exercise gear, sleek-looking sweat pants and shirts. Some music is playing on a boom-box, Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World!” The women have their eyes shut and they are caressing the old juniper. One of them stands cuddling the tree’s trunk; another leans her cheek against the splintery-looking bark. The third stands on tiptoes in a yoga pose to stroke the tree’s needles while the fourth woman sits at the base of the juniper with her back against the trunk, straddling the tree’s serpentine roots, sand- and wind-polished in the desert pavement below the twisted tree. The tree’s shadow is ornate with the women festooning it.
The juniper is a venerable distinguished tree and looks affronted at the unseemly attention that these women are according him. Like an old druid, he seems to turn away – there is a distinct
contrappossto flex to his trunk. The women seem to be ecstatic, lips half open, panting in the high-altitude air. A raven in the bush hoots at them.
15.
In Oaxaca, I met a man who knew David Hatcher Childress and had traveled with him. Childress is the Indiana Jones of pseudoarchaeologists, a reliably omniscent talking head for TV shows espousing theories about the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis, the hollow Earth, and the chariots of the Gods. The man that I knew was an administrator retired for the Ohio Department of Human Services based in Cleveland, a sardonic civil servant who, despite expressing skepticism about Childress’ various theories, had ventured with him to some remote plateau in Melanesia to view a half-dozen badly weathered megaliths, big stone pillars the color of bird-lime and carved to look like white owls or space aliens depending upon your perspective. While we were standing in the ruins at Monte Alban, the former Ohio Human Services administrator showed me some pictures on his phone – someone had obligingly photographed him next to the recognizable figure of Childress, the pseudo-archaeologist wearing a floppy Indiana Jones hat, a ten foot specter of eroded pale stone between them. Some weird-looking trees and a wet, grassy meadow, startlingly green, completed the picture. According to the retired civil servant, the tour was very small – just Childress and his wife with another couple and the man from Cleveland. They flew to Hong Kong and dined at expensive restaurants and everyone drank to excess. The group gambled in Macau and, then, took a shuttle flight to some island, another flight on a smaller plane, and, then, traveled eleven hours by jeep over bad roads to reach the monuments. There were a half-dozen of the forlorn sandstone figures, pale colossi standing in a terrace among misty mountains. Childress was very generous, my informant told me, and he didn’t really impose his idiotic ideas on his guests and the accommodations and air travel were all first-rate.
Childress, whose home base is a small town in Illinois near Joliet, first moved to the Midwest when Stelle was founded, an “intentional” community just outside of south Chicago that was founded according to a Lemurian constitution in the late 1950's. Childress was a little too exotic for the Lemurians and, so, he migrated down the road to Kempton where he founded the Adventures Unlimited Publishing House. I’ve read many of his articles – he’s an effective writer with a breathless, engaging style but his work is very repetitive. Heavy rocks are always lifted by levitation and hardy prehistoric seafarers are always crossing the seas to erect pyramids. A strict cultural diffusionist, Childress argues that if a building looks similar to some other structure, then, the same group of people must have erected these monuments. On this theory, Childress believes that the pyramids of Egypt were built by the same folks who built the Aztec and Mayan pyramids, the mounds at Cahokia, and the Nubian pyramid-tombs along the Nile in Sudan. Ultimately, all culture traces back to the blonde, blue-eyed architects of Tiwanuku’s sun-gate on the altiplano in Bolivia – and these builders were both space-aliens and the progenitors of Plato’s lost utopia in Atlantis. (Some critics accuse Childress of racism.)
In the Grand Canyon, erosion (as conventional science would argue) has created vast conical pinnacles, the so-called temples which are, of course, shaped like pyramids, albeit badly melted and half-collapsed ones. From Moran Point, the visitor can see the steeples of Shiva, Isis, and Osiris Temples, huge striated buttes that rise to sheer triangular peaks. Since these land-forms look like pyramids, David Hatcher Childress, with characteristic boldness, leaps to the conclusion that these mountains submerged in the immensity of the canyon are, in fact, man-made, vast pyramids dating from the Lemurian age, built by an unknown technology that relied upon levitation and Vimana flight – immemorial epochs have eroded the once gleaming and geometrically precise pyramids into their current rugged form. Underneath these pyramids, caves open into the hollow earth and hecatombs of mummies are hidden under the roiling waters of the Colorado River. If you don’t believe me, read Childress’
Lost Cities of Central and South Americas (Adventure Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois).
In recent years, Childress has expanded his portfolio – books published in the past decade involve the Yeti and Sasquatch, anti-gravity devices, Tesla’s technology, Vimana aviation techniques, the pole-shifts, and the Knights Templar.
16.
Childress’ lost Egyptian city, built (he claims) by Lemurians in the bowels of the Canyon, has a historical precedent. On March 12, 1909, the
Arizona Gazette in Phoenix reported that a traveler, a certain G. E. Kincaid, replicated Powell’s famous canyon passage, entering the maze of gorges on the Green River in Wyoming and making his way to Yuma, Arizona. The March 12,1909 note is a single paragraph, observing that “the most interesting part of the trip was passing sideways in the wooden skiff through the sluiceways at the dam at Laguna.” Kincaid was said to have unearthed several intriguing archaeological “finds” in the canyon.
On April 5, 1909, a front page article under a banner headline expands on the short note published three weeks earlier. Now the adventurer is named G. E. Kinkaid, someone affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute. Kinkaid has acquired a fellow-adventurer, S. A. Jordard, a “supervisor with the Smithsonian.” In the Marble Canyon area, Kinkaid is said to have discovered a great cavern that, once entered, opened into a wheel-and-spokes system of tunnels carved into the living rock. In the center of the tunnels, a chamber full of mummies was found together with iron and bronze artifacts, chariots, and weapons – the walls of the caves were said to be covered in “hieroglyphs of the sort found in Mexico.” The second headline article refers back to the humble earlier note, published on March 12, 1909. Curious journalists contacted the Smithsonian for public comment, but since these discoveries were revolutionary and would topple current and much-entrenched savants from their University chairs, the institution denied any knowledge of the expedition. Indeed, the Smithsonian said that it had never employed, or worked with any Kinkaid (or Kincaid) and didn’t know his side-kick, S. A. Jordard.
One might note that the date of the April 5,1909 press release is conspicuously close to April 1, that is April Fool’s Day. A thousand explorers have searched for the lost Egyptian tombs in the depths of the canyon’s inner gorge, but without success.
17.
There were said to be Seven Cities of Gold somewhere beyond the limitless, blistering plains that are now Kansas. In 1540, Francisco de Vasquez Coronado’s army marched West across mountains and deserts in search of those cities.
At one of the pueblos in what is presently northern Arizona, Coronado’s troops rested. He sent two expeditions further west, one led by a commander named Tovar, and a group of thirteen conquistadors under the rule of Garcia Lopez de Cardenas. Indian guides led Cardenas’ party to the precipice of the Grand Canyon – it was a place said to be “elevated, with twisted pines and very cold – open to the north.” The description is unhelpful as a locator because it defines just about any place on the 277 mile south rim. The Indians warned the Spaniards against descending into the “mountain lying on its side” – in the depths of the gorge, there was a crater-like hole to which the souls of the dead migrated. (Other tribes said that the first human beings had emerged from that pit – the so-called sipapuna or navel of the world.) Nonetheless, with ropes, Cardenas’ men lowered three volunteers over the cliff and onto the talus fields under the rim. The men scrambled down the steep hillside to a point where they could see the river pulsing in the inner gorge. It was too dangerous to continue their descent and, so, they crawled back up through the loose stone to the ropes under the rim and were hauled back out of the canyon.
The men reported that a group of boulders seen from the precipice’s brink and, appearing from that vantage, to be as tall as standing men, were, in fact, immense, the “size of the great tower at Seville.” Distances were deceptive – inconsequential sheer spots as viewed from the rim were actually cliffs hundreds of feet high. (The “great tower of Seville” built as a minaret to a Moorish mosque is 342 feet high.) The explorers said that the canyon was an eerie place, full of strange echoes and hollow chasms where wild beasts could be heard howling. It was a sort of Hell not fit for humans.
Cardenas’ men retreated to the Hopi pueblo on the chaparral to the East of the canyon. The gorge was impassable. Later Tovar’s group also rejoined the main company – he had reached the canyon near what is now called Bright Angel Point. He had not attempted to descend into the canyon. Further travel was impossible beyond that promontory, even, probably, lethal.
18.
In 1976, a hiker in the canyon found an inscription on a sandstone ledge near Mystic Springs. This seep is located at the base of a side-canyon where seasonally a trickle of water dances down to the Colorado. The inscription, neatly carved in block letters, says
Monte Video (to be interpreted as Spanish for “you can see the mountain from here.”) Immediately, some scholars claimed that the inscription was a mark dating back to the Cardenas’ expedition into the canyon in 1540.
Mystic Springs is under the so-called Esplanade, that is the big thumb of level land gouging into the eye of the canyon below Bright Angel Point. A few hours trek from Mystic Springs, a tourist camp operated from 1885 to 1923 – this was during the period of first-come, first-serve exploitation of the canyon before these competitive practices were ended by the National Park Service. The tourist camp on the edge of the Esplanade and above Crystal Creek, the water oozing from Mystic Springs, and was called the Bass Camp after its founder, William Bass, and the proprietor of a trail hewn out of the rock dropping down into the inner gorge, not surprisingly called the South Bass Trail. Although the National Park Service now conceals the location of these trails as well as the route to Mystic Springs, several articles have been written about the “Monte Video” inscription. The letters are carefully carved with elegant serifs – something that would have been taken time and not likely to have been accomplished by the exhausted and hard-bitten Spaniards, who may not even have been literate. A rusty can of beans was found a dozen feet from the inscription. The letters don’t resemble a rock-carving made at El Morro and definitively linked to the Coronado expedition. Finally, in 36 years intervening from 1976 to 2012, the letters have eroded conspicuously. These factors lead to the conclusion that the “Monte Video” inscription was made during the tourist era. Bass is known to have led tours down to Mystic Springs and, presumably, someone whiled away an hour or so, cutting the letters into the soft sandstone between 1885 and 1923.
19.
Someone saw a snake wriggling through a notch in the stone on the canyon floor. At first, the observers were indifferent to the spectacle. But, then, someone remarked that the serpent in the gorge was a couple miles away – this meant that the creature was a hundred yards long and as thick as a locomotive. The scale of the creature was hard to assess from the canyon rim.
All sorts of mysterious, large beasts are imagined to live in the canyon: cougars the size of horses ambush mule trains, primates with glowing red eyes hurl stones down from the heights onto unsuspecting hikers, and, in the inferno of the inner gorge, lost pilgrims encounter platter-sized tarantulas with red furry legs and amber-colored scorpions larger than most cats.
Kites of black lazily circling raw, reddish cliffsides are condors. Condors mate for life and a breeding couple of the birds occupies a cave on the flanks of a destroyer-shaped butte. From a vantage on the Hermit’s Rest road, you can see a tiny black speck on the cliff-side a mile away and a half-mile below. This is the cave where the birds have nested.
Condors are peculiar birds. They have no sense of smell, lay a single huge blue egg, and, because they have no syrinx, communicate by gutteral grunts. If left unmolested, a condor can live for sixty years. For some reason, people are moved to pitch coins into the abyss. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long and between eight to 18 miles wide and it seems quixotic to me to throw a penny or nickel into that void. No god will notice the coin as it falls past epochs of geological time embodied in parallel strata colored like bacon or lichens on a boulder or agate or shale like a freshly washed chalk-board or veins of coal and cooled lava and oozing sandstone. It’s a cosmos too vast for the intervention of a mere falling coin to affect much of anything. But the condors have eyes like telescopes and what glitters is gold to them and they swoop down to pluck up the coin and swallow it. The condors most recently found dead in the depths below the rim are zinc-poisoned, killed by gorging themselves on coins pitched into the canyon.
It is macabre to imagine giant condors feasting on the dead air travelers fallen into the canyon after the mid-air collision between two passenger planes over the canyon on June 30, 1956. Banish the picture from your mind. California condors were almost extinct in 1956 (probably about 21 breeding pairs all in zoos) and they had long ceased to live within the confines of the National Park. (Condors were re-introduced to the Grand Canyon from the breeding program at Vermillion Cliffs in 1996). Whether turkey buzzards or other carrion-feeders consumed casualties of the crash must remain a matter of conjecture. One can certainly imagine the baleful shadow of raven’s wings scooping darkness out of the garish, striated cliffs, ravine and gorge strewn with smoking debris.
Around 9:00 am, two planes departed from LAX in Los Angeles. TransWorld Flight 2 (a Lockheed Super Constellation) was bound for Kansas City and assigned a cruising altitude of 19,000 feet. United Airlines Flight 718 (a Douglas DC-7) was bound for Midway Airport in Chicago and controlled to fly at 21,000 feet. Both flights encountered towering cumulus clouds perilous with lightning and downbursts of wind. The planes requested permission to fly around the thunderstorms and the Super Constellation was authorized to ascend to a thousand feet above the wind-scoured tops of the thunderheads – this was on “a see and avoid” protocol (that is, the pilot was supposed to look for other flights in nearby airspace and avoid them) that placed both the DC-7 and the Super Constellation at the same elevation. The two planes collided over the canyon, near the North Rim, between Chuar Mountain and Temple Butte. The DC-7 was ripped open by the Super Constellation’s wing and explosively decompressed in mid-air so that debris and body-parts rained down over a large area in the ravines and side-canyons near Temple Butte. The Super Constellation dropped into a vertical plunge bursting like a bomb against the northeast slope of Temple Butte. A huge fire ensued and a cloud of smoke rose over the canyon – initially, the smoke was thought to arise from a brush-fire caused by a lightning strikes. A light plane flying a tourist excursion over the canyon saw metal fragments on the steep cliff-side at Temple Butte and, soon, it was concluded that the two passenger planes had collided with devastating effect.
The site of the crash was inaccessible. The Swiss Air Rescue team was deployed and used helicopters to reach the nearby buttes – mountaineers were lowered into the gorge. Of course, such an event doesn’t produce survivors. In fact, this kind of catastrophe doesn’t really produce anything like articulated human bodies. As much as could be collected was scoured from the charred rock cliffs. Twenty-nine unidentified corpses, mostly reduced to small shredded fragments, were buried in four caskets at the Grand Canyon Pioneer Cemetery.
Nature is resilient. The burn marks on the cliff walls faded. A hiker passing through the area in the mid-sixties saw some metal glinting on a cliff terrace. The metal pieces were small, eighteen-inches long, shapeless and impossible to identify as an part of a plane. You can’t collect artifacts in the park. The plane-shards are now as protected as the chunks of ancient ceramic that monsoon floods carve out of the eroded hillsides.
20.
Emery Kolb’s grave is marked in Grand Canyon Pioneer Cemetery. The little 400-site graveyard is located a half-mile from the rim in a forest of ponderosa pine near the hiring hall and the worker dormitories. Kolb was one of the park’s early entrepreneurs and lived on the south rim until his death in December 1976.
Ellsworth Kolb was three years older than his brother, Emery, and he was the first to come west. Ellsworth was born in Smithfield, a remote suburb of Pittsburgh Pa. He rode the rails west to Pikes Peak around 1900, worked for the railroad and drove a snow plow clearing the Manitou railroad line near Colorado Springs. In 1901, he road the trains to Winslow, Arizona, then, hiked toward the Grand Canyon. He had saved enough money to ride the last 12 miles to the Grand Canyon by rail– he flagged the train down on the high mesa. At Grand Canyon Village, Ellsworth Kolb did odd jobs and bussed tables in the dining halls at Bright Angel Point. At that time, small cabins and canvas tents tightly crowded together formed a kind community pressed up against the canyon rim. Photographs from the time show a village that looks a bit like a military encampment, spartan lodgings and tents staked up on wooden platforms, with a couple larger structures, leaning forward even more precariously over the brink, lathe and log porches cantilevered out over empty air. These more permanent buildings were raw-looking railroad hotels and dining halls. The place was like a boom town and Ellsworth Kolb had the wit to recognize that there was money to be made from the tourists flocking to the site on new rail line.
Kolb urged his younger and more combative brother, Emery, to make the trip west. Emery arrived in 1902, heavily laden with photographic gear that he had bought using all of his savings at a studio in Winslow. The boys set up tent and log cabin directly overlooking the Bright Angel Trail head. In those days, a trip to the Canyon always involved a mule ride down below the rim. The Kolb’s took pictures of the mule trains as they descended into the gorge, commandeering a promontory rising over one of the first switchbacks on the trail. From that vantage, the Kolb brothers were able to take high-resolution pictures of the entire mule-train, the dudes self-conscious in their store-bought western wear, perched uneasily atop the small and docile beasts of burden. The tour guides paused on the downward descent beneath the vantage so that a picture recording the adventure could be made. When the tourists emerged sunburnt, parched, and exhausted from the gorge, the Kolb brothers peddled them a picture of the mule-train, suitable for framing, as a souvenir of their adventure. (Emery Kolb estimated that he had taken more than 50,000 mule-train pictures.) I imagine that these pictures, taken in black and white and showing the mules on the trail, neatly spaced as if on risers like a school choir so that each and every pale face could be seen, would-be cowboys grimacing uneasily on their unfamiliar and uncomfortable saddles...I suppose that these photographs once graced a thousand parlors, set atop Steinway pianos perhaps or on fireplace hearths, probably flanked by a bit of Acoma or faux-Mimbres pottery.
By 1906, the Kolb brothers had built a studio on the rocky point overlooking the first ramps leading down to the Bright Angel trail. These endeavors, however, came to the attention of the Fred Harvey Company and the larger, better-funded firm began to take measures to run the Kolb boys out of the park. The Harvey Company had built El Tovar Hotel by this time and was slowly buying out the other cabin and campground operators clustered around the canyon edge at Bright Angel. The Harvey money-men tried to buy out the Kolb’s but they resisted – they were making plenty of money at their studio and had designs on developing some of the more remote points of interest below the rim. When the Kolb boys turned-down the Harvey offer on their concession, the situation deteriorated. Harvey designers, most notably Mary Colter, were recruited to set up a competing photographic studio. The Harvey Company bought a conspicuous pinnacle of rock closer to El Tovar and the Bright Angel Lodge than the Kolb studio perched above the mule-train trail into the gorge. Mary Colter designed a stony fortification on that point, a Harvey-owned photography studio located on a eyrie above an impressive 1500 foot drop. The idea was to seduce tourists into the Bright Angel Studio as it was called, diverting business away from Kolb Brothers’ operation another 200 yards farther down the rim. (I can attest that the plan was sound – I walked on the scary causeway out to the Bright Angel studio thinking that it was the Kolb photography operation. I was surprised to learn that the Kolb enterprise was in a concession, a large nondescript building a bit like a shingle-style house or school, hovering atop another promontory point to the west of Colter’s heap of field-stone masonry.)
The Kolb’s were not deterred. They launched expeditions into the gorge and, using primitive motion picture cameras, recorded the rapids and inner gorge cliffs from the bottom of the canyon. The year 1914 probably represented the height of their explorations in the canyon. (The canyon itself was not reliably surveyed until U.S. Geographical surveys in the late thirties and, finally, culminating with maps published around 1951). In 1914, the Kolb boys had pride of place in a National Geographic volume devoted to the canyon. The boys rafted through the gorge and took thrilling motion pictures of their adventures. In a remote side-canyon up against the towering north rim, a huge waterfall thunders from a cave near the top of the escarpment – this is Cheyava Falls. The cataract is seasonal, but when the water is falling, the drop is 800 feet. No one knew the source of the water that periodically roared out of the deep cavern bored into the top of the cliff. Emery and Ellsworth Kolb made their way to the cataract, approaching over the mostly unexplored wilderness of the Kaibab plateau, the forest at 8300 feet that comprises the North Rim. They located a cliff just above the waterfall and had themselves lowered down into the mouth of the cave. At this time, the water was flowing in full spate, an enormous frothy column dropping down into Crystal Creek canyon. As this venture was underway, a thunderstorm boiled up over the north rim and it began to rain and the wind whipped at the men dangling from 200 foot-long ropes over the chasm and waterfall. Just as the hail began to shred the trees above the canyon, Emery and Ellsworth sought shelter in the cave, mostly occupied by a locomotive-sized jet of white-water spewing out of the cliff-face. Of course, pictures and films were made, brought back to their studios at Bright Angel and there prepared for display to the tourists.
Ellsworth and Emory’s cliff-face studio didn’t have adequate fire exits and old cellulose film was dangerously flammable. Harvey Company snitches reported the hazard to the authorities in Flagstaff and the movie theater was shut down. This inspired the boys to embark on a tour of the East Coast where they presented their film to packed houses. Some of the footage has survived and it is very impressive – small wooden boats are battered by enormous waves in rapids surging under mile-high cliffs; Indians dance in front of strange-looking pueblo tenements; elk and antelope abound and fishermen pull odd creatures from the muddy Colorado River.
The feud with the Harvey Company continued for many years, until it was supplanted by an even fiercer battle with National Park Service. Beginning in 1919, the Park gradually acquired all the land on the south rim, granting concessions to the Harvey operation at El Tovar and Bright Angel Lodge (and allowing a concession as well for the Lookout Photographic Studio designed by Mary Colter.) In 1926, Ellsworth could no longer tolerate his brother – their history is replete with stories of fistfights and other brawls on the narrow canyon trails and at the rim of the abyss. They agreed to divide their business on the basis of the flip of a coin. Ellsworth lost. Emery was the winner and began to buy out his brother – he continued to pay Ellsworth a percentage of the profits until his brother’s death. The Harvey Company and the National Park were unnerved by Emery assuming control of the enterprise – Emery drove a far harder bargain than his more mild-mannered brother. Emery had a hot temper and wasn’t afraid to threaten people with violence – during his feud with the Harvey Company, he enlisted Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian, as an ally, pestered State Senators for assistance, and implied that there would be a gun-battle if someone tried to appropriate his premises. Ultimately, Emery Kolb’s persistence paid off – he was granted a lifelong concession by the National Park Service on the condition that, after his death, his property would be transferred (for an agreed-upon sum) to the Park.
There is an eerie footnote to the story of Emery Kolb. In November 1928, Glen and Bessie Hyde descended into the canyon on Bright Angel Trail. The Hyde’s were newly wed and the trip to the Canyon was their honeymoon. Glen was a self-promoter and his plan was to run the canyon rapids with Bessie – they would make a movie and Bessie would become renowned as the first woman to successfully navigate the terrifying white water in the inner gorge. Emery Kolb was the gatekeeper to the inner canyon for all practical purposes – he had a boat house at the bottom of the gorge where he rented skiffs for running the rapids. Some suggest that Kolb fell in love with the intrepid Bessie Hyde – others imply that Kolb was concerned about his business, that is, competition with his films and photographs showing adventures in the gorge. In any event, Glen and Bessie Hyde vanished without a trace – they never emerged from the canyon and foul play was suspected. Emery Kolb was a tough character, nasty to the extent that it was rumored that he had killed the young couple – but nothing could be proven. A camera was found on a sand bar. Pictures in the camera showed that Glen and Bessie had reached the Marble Canyon rapids before something happened to them.
Neither the skiff nor any bodies were ever discovered. People went missing below the rim all the time. In 1971, an elderly woman on white-water rafting tour announced to the guide that she was Bessie Hyde. She said that she had quarreled with her husband during the arduous river-run. He had beaten her and so she clubbed him over the head with a rock while he was sleeping. Then, she made her way alone out of the gorge. (The old lady was duly taken to the authorities after the white-water excursion and she recanted, denying the entire story.)
There’s a sequel to this story that is even stranger. After Emery Kolb died, the contents of his boat-house on the rim, in effect, a storage shed, were inspected. A man’s skeleton, fully articulated, was found neatly concealed in an old canoe. Everyone assumed that the cadaver would turn out to be Glen Hyde since it was generally thought that Emery had killed the man. Forensic study showed that the bones didn’t match descriptions of Hyde and, in any event, couldn’t be older than a death date in 1972. Later, the skeleton (you can see pictures of the skull with a big, neat hole shot through the right temple, just above the ear) was claimed to be the remains of some poor tourist who had committed suicide on a ledge under the rim in 1932. The man was too afraid to jump to his death and so shot himself in the head with his revolver. How Emery Kolb came into possession of the skeleton and why it was concealed on his property is unknown. Kolb was a showman and would have exhibited the mummy of his mother if he thought that this would turn a profit. My surmise is that he came upon the corpse during one of his ambles through the canyon and retrieved it for the purpose of putting the thing on display. In the Kolb studios, there are several photographs of a skeleton resting on a rock ledge shot against the scenic expanse of the canyon – the pictures look staged (purportedly they show a dead prospector), but, I think, Emery would have been happy to have a nice, clean skeleton in his possession to use as a prop in his museum and for photographs.
21.
And I’m not completely done with my footnotes to footnotes relating to the strange career of Emery Kolb. An equally disagreeable person, in fact a female version of Emery Kolb, haunted the tourist concessions at the Village and Bright Angel Point. This was the lady river-runner, Georgie Clark. Clark succeeded where Bessie Hyde failed – she became famous as the first woman to successfully run the whole gauntlet of the river rapids, a feat that she accomplished in1952. Thereafter, Georgie Clark was famous and, in her old age as a colorful, foul-mouthed dame, even appeared on The Johnny Carson Show. Georgie operated her own concession in the bowels of the canyon – well into her seventh decade, she led white-water rafting expeditions down the Colorado.
There was only one problem with this business: Georgie Clark, although personally fearless, was staggeringly incompetent. She simply didn’t care whether her tourists survived the trip or not. Many rafting casualties have been ascribed to her. She was the engineer of the calamity that resulted in the first helicopter rescue of a badly injured person from the bottom of the canyon.
Once during the mid-sixties, Georgie launched her raft into the rapids from a very dangerous rock rim. The boat capsized and a woman named Norma Abrams was killed. The Coconino County Sheriff, Ken
Crumbo hustled down the escarpments driving a mule mercilessly to reach the scene of the tragedy. Norma’s body was hung up in some flotsam and difficult to reach. Crumbo pulled the corpse out of the rapids, injuring his back in the process. Georgie was angry that the recovery was taking so long – she had another group of tourists on mule-back descending the gorge and they would be at the launch site shortly. She harangued the Sheriff and told him to get the dead body out of sight. Sheriff Crumbo was angry himself: “So you want me to just hide the body?” he demanded. Georgie wasn’t about to be intimidated: “You’re damn right I do. Now get her out of sight before you scare these people.” She gestured in the direction of the cliffs and the trail.
When Georgie Clark died, some peculiar things were found in her lingerie drawer: the original of the marriage license for Glen and Bessie Hyde was among the underwear as well as Bessie Hyde’s revolver. These discoveries led many people to believe that Georgie Clark was, in fact, Bessie Hyde. This seems improbable – ages and descriptive features don’t work out exactly right. Others think that Georgie (perhaps with Emery) was somehow involved in the disappearance of the Glen and Bessie Hyde. But who knows? The canyon conceals many things.
22.
On Hermit’s Rest road, a railed walkway leads to an overlook where a small flat-topped pyramid clings to the rim of the cliff. The pyramid is made from field-stone with fifteen or so steps that rise to its top. A bronze tablet embedded in poured concrete surmounts the little rock platform. The tablet commemorates Colonel John Wesley Powell’s successful passage through the great canyons of the west between May and September 1869.
Powell, of course, was a charismatic figure, an adventurer with one arm who had been maimed at the Battle of Shiloh. His book about the expedition was published in 1875,
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. The volume is copiously illustrated with impressively grim woodcuts of the mighty canyons, dark and shadowy chasms under vast black cliffs, as well as some murky photographs and various ethnographic sketches of Indians encountered during the expedition. Powell was a vigorous, descriptive writer and much of his prose has a cinematic flavor. The book makes thrilling reading and is, undoubtedly, a classic of its kind.
Powell had been born in 1834 in Illinois but from early youth was a great hiker. When merely a boy, he spent several weeks ambling across Wisconsin when the State was still wild with wolves and bears and Indians disgruntled at the little settlements of White pioneers springing up on the middle border. Later, he piloted a raft down the Mississippi from St. Paul to New Orleans. He was an intrepid soldier and returned to service after his right arm was amputated when shattered by a bullet at Shiloh. Late in his life, he wrote a moving preface to a new edition of his report, initially made to the Smithsonian Institute in 1875. Powell tell us that most of his fellow explorers “are dead and the living are gray with age”. But he reports that:
(T)heir bronzed, hardy, brave faces come before me as they appeared in the vigor of life; their lithe but powerful forms seem to move around me; and the memory of the men and their heroic deeds, the men and their generous acts, overwhelms me with a joy that seems almost a grief, for it starts a fountain of tears. I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men never forgot it. In every danger, my safety was their first care and in every waking hour some kind service was rendered to me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon.
There really couldn’t be any finer tribute. Powell, then, lists the heroes to whom he dedicates the book, including Frank Goodman, William H. Dunn, and the brothers, O. G. and Seneca Howland. These four men are conspicuous by their absence on the monument at Powell Point. Why is this?
Powell tells the story effectively. You should read his book. I will simply paraphrase.
With his nine companions, Powell embarked on his canyon exploration on May 24, 1869. His small flotilla consisted of three freight boats, each 21 feet long and fashioned from white oak, as well as a 16- foot white pine scout boat. The scout keel-boat was named
Emma Dean after Powell’s wife. The freight boats were called
The Maid of the Canyon, Kitty Clyde’s Sister, and
No Name. (The boats were built in Chicago and shipped by rail to Green River’s Union Pacific station.) No one knew how long the expedition would be – the length of the meandering and looping river was uncharted and thought to be perilous with waterfalls and rapids.
Powell was cautious and, generally, hauled the boats out of the water to drag them around rapids. However, at a canyon in Colorado that Powell named the Gates of the Lodore, two weeks after embarking, a calamity ensued. Powell had banked the
Emma Dean and was walking along the edge of the river surveying a swift passage of water that dropped into a malevolent-looking and churning “sag”. As he was inspecting the river for a “chute” through which to pass, the
No Name glided by, apparently unaware that the scout boat had stopped to assess the situation. The
No Name slipped into the “sag”, was whirled around and, then, smashed to bits. Frank Goodman, the pilot of the
No Name, was thrown into the chaotic waters but saved himself by clinging to a rock in the river. Seneca Howland, the other man in the boat, was flung into the shallows and made it to the river’s edge. Howland waded to an island and used an oar to try to retrieve Goodman. Goodman seized the oar and pulled himself to safety. But, then, Howland who jumped into the water to retrieve the oar – it had been dropped in the rapids – was swept downstream, mauled by some rocks, although he managed to wriggle out of the current. Fragments of the
No Name were found washed ashore for about a quarter mile below the rapids, now dubbed “Disaster Falls.” Some barometers and other scientific devices were retrieved as well as a three-gallon keg of whiskey. Powell disapproved of strong drink and the whiskey was, strictly speaking, contraband, but he remarks in his book that he was “glad that they did take it” because the spirits “would do them good” since the men were “drenched every day by the melting snow that runs down from the summits of the mountains.”
In swift succession, a series of other disasters, or near-disasters, ensued. At a campsite, the explorers’ fire ignited some dry willows and, in the flash-fire, several men were singed. There were several white-water runs that nearly capsized boats. At intervals, Powell and other men would ascend to the canyon rim, often making 2000 foot climbs up steep rock faces. At one point, Powell became stranded on a sheer precipice 800 feet above the river. One of the men had to remove his drawers to create a makeshift rope that Powell could seize with his one hand and be pulled to safety. On July 6, 1869, Powell’s company encountered a miserable and untended Indian garden in an alcove in the canyon. The garden belonged to a trader named Johnson who had an Indian wife. Powell and his men raided the garden and ate, as greens, potato tops. This induced terrible nausea and diarrhea. By this point, Frank Goodman was disgusted with the whole enterprise – there was a trail leading from the garden up toward the Uintah (Ute) agency at what is now Vernal, Utah. Goodman said that he was leaving the expedition and hiked to the agency. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the old prospector played by Walter Huston is called away from the caravan transporting gold from their mine to an Indian village where a child is dying. Huston’s character, Howard, heals the boy and becomes a respected shaman in the village. The movie shows him surrounded by admiring Indian girls, feasting as he reclines comfortable hammock under a shade tree. I imagine that something similar happened with Frank Goodman. He settled at the agency in Vernal and became the patriarch of a large family, members of which remain prominent in the area to this day.
Powell continued down the river for what would be a total of 111 days. On August 27, the remaining members of the expedition reached a terrifying set of rapids that seemed impassable. Huge boulders blocked the river with water roiling between them in a series of roaring falls. Because of sharp angles made by immense rock faces curtaining parts of the canyon below the falls, the men could not see the full scope of cataract. Powell climbed 400 feet up the granite wall, scouted the downstream course of the river, but, then, found that he was pinioned against the cliff-face unable to descend. Several of the men had to climb to a pinnacle below him and, then, extract Powell from a fissure using two oars like giant forceps. After a harrowing descent, Powell told the men that the boats could be affixed to ropes and lowered over the boulders comprising the brink of the first cataract. In the swift-running river below the boulders, the boats would have to be rowed lateral to the current, crossing to the other side of the river to slip into a fast chute sluicing along the prism-shaped side of the canyon. William Dunn, with Captain O.G. Howland and his brother, Seneca, doubted that this maneuver would be possible. Dunn and the Howlands suggested that the rapids were impassable and that the boats would have to be abandoned. There was much earnest discussion on this subject and, finally, Dunn with the two Howland brothers decided that they would leave the expedition and climb out of the canyon to march toward a Mormon settlement about 75 miles away. The Powell Monument omits Goodman, Dunn, and the Howland brothers on the basis that they “deserted” the expedition. The truth is more complex. Powell himself wasn’t certain that the boats would survive the passage over this great obstacle, two massive waterfalls in the river. Ultimately, a decision was made to simply part ways. Powell gave a rifle and two shotguns to the three men who intended to leave the expedition. He also moored the
Emma Dean in a lagoon above the waterfall in case Dunn and the Howland brothers found the canyon walls, very precipitous in this place and complex with narrow and sheer-walled side gorges, insurmountable. Finally, the expedition’s records, kept in duplicate, were divided between the parties. Dunn and the two Howland brothers were entrusted with one of the copies of the expedition’s survey notes and diaries.
The parting, in a place now called Separation Canyon, was solemn. The men embraced. Sumner, who had cast his fate with Powell, gave Dunn his watch as a keepsake and asked him to deliver it to his wife if the expedition failed. Powell wrote a letter to his wife and entrusted it to O. G. Howland. By this time, the expedition had only a few days of rations remaining – the loss of the
No Name, several months earlier, had resulted in the destruction of more than half of the explorers’ provisions. Dunn and the Howland brothers thought it was madness to proceed and that the rapids would surely wreck the two surviving boats. Even if the explorers survived the waterfalls, no one knew how much more of the canyon remained or what horrible dangers might be encountered downstream of that point.
Before they left the expedition, Dunn and the Howland brothers helped to lower the two boats down over the boulder dam into the first rapids.
The Maid of the Canyons and
Kitty Clyde’s Sister zoomed through the rapids sluicing by the big angular projection of rock and were lost to view. The three men, then, began their trek up a side canyon to find a way out of the gorge.
As it happened, the chute that Powell had observed running along the rock face was readily navigated. The two boats shot down the river, around the cliff face, and, then, found still water. Powell notes that the run took less than one minute and that the expedition had passed many worse places. In the calm waters below the rapids, Powell had his men fire several shots into the air. This was a signal that the cascade had been successfully navigated and that the three other men should take the
Emma Dean and run the rapids. Powell waited for Dunn and the Howland’s for two hours. They didn’t appear and, so, he continued with the two remaining boats down the canyon. After another terrifying passage over additional falls in which the stem-lock on one of the boats was shattered and Powell’s vessel capsized in the white-water, the six explorers reached the end of the canyon – it was August 29, 1869, only a day after separating from Dunn and O.G. and Seneca Howland.
Powell records that the two boats banked at a mesquite thicket where they camped for the night.
Powell’s relief at having survived the passage through the canyon is expressed in a passage that reminds us that the explorer had been maimed, his right arm amputated after battle in the Civil War:
The relief from danger and the joy of success was great. When he who has been chained by wounds to a hospital cot until his canvas tent seems like a dungeon cell, until the groans of those who lie about tortured with knife and probe are piled up, a weight of horror on his ears that he cannot throw off, cannot forget, and until the stench of wounds and anesthetic drugs has filled the air with its loathsome burthen – when he at last goes out into the open field, what a world he sees! How beautiful the sky, how bright the sunshine, what “floods of delirious music” pour from the throats of birds, how sweet the fragrance of earth and tree and blossoms! The first hour of convalescent freedom seems rich recompense for all pain and gloom and terror.
23.
What happened to O. G. Howland, Seneca Howland, and William Dunn? The simplest answer is that no one knows. The three men vanished and their bodies were never found.
On September 7, 1869, while Powell and his surviving expedition members were recuperating in a Mormon town in Utah territory, a telegraph message reached them. The news was dire. The Howland brothers and Dunn had been killed by the “Shebits” Indians, a small clan speaking Paiute that lived in the pinon and ponderosa forests on the Kaibab plateau north of the canyon. The three men, in a condition much-distressed, were said to have encountered the Indians and been fed by them. The White men repaid the Indian’s hospitality by molesting one of their women and, even, shooting her dead. The Shebits tribesmen took swift revenge and the three men were hunted down and killed. Powell was not willing to accept this account: he told journalists that he rejected out of hand the notion that Dunn and the Howlands had attacked a native woman: “They were honorable men and gentlemen. I have no hesitation in pronouncing that part of the story (the assault on the woman) as libel.”
A year later, Powell and another group of explorers returned to the canyons to complete their surveys and maps. On September 19, 1870, Powell was camped on the cold and windy plateau north of the canyon near some battered walls of an abandoned Indian pueblo. The natives living in this area were very poor and primitive, half-naked people who sheltered in temporary huts woven from pine branches, subsisting mostly on the seeds of goldenrod, sunflowers, and various grasses. Powell recounts the customs of these people, noting that they considered grasshopper “gruel” or flatcakes (insects mixed with ground seed flour) a particular treat. In the evening, after the campfire had been built, several Paiute-speaking Indians from the Shi’vwits clan appeared with a Mormon missionary Jacob Hamblin. The Indians were both voluble and peaceful – they passed around a pipe and smoked some tobacco. Hamblin translated the Indians’ words to Powell, who was called Ka’purats (“One Arm” in Shoshone). The Shi’vwits hunters said that the three White men had stumbled into their encampment exhausted and starving. The Indians gave them food and shelter. Then, a member of the tribe who lived in another village arrived at the encampment and said that the White men were, in fact, three murderous prospectors who had raped and shot a woman several days earlier. When the White men were confronted with this accusation, they loudly declared their innocence – but no one had seen White men on this plateau before and there was no doubt in the minds of the Indians that Dunn and the two Howlands were the very same men who had killed the woman. The Indians told the three explorers to leave the encampment. But they followed them stealthily and, from ambush, “filled them with arrows.” Powell concluded that it was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. He wrote that it was an odd sensation to be sleeping “not more than 500 yards away” from the Indians who were “the murderers of his men.” Bad thing happened on the frontier. And Powell says he slept in peace knowing that his mule train and provisions would have made the impoverished Indians “rich beyond (their) wildest dreams” but that these were “all safe” and that the honesty of these people was so great that “not even a lump of sugar was pilfered by the children.”
Jacob Hamblin, the Mormon missionary who translated for the Shi’vwits tribesmen, was a somewhat sinister figure. He was implicated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre and had earlier used alliances with the Paiutes to murder gentiles crossing Utah territory. Several historians recount an alternative version of the deaths of Dunn and the Howlands. At that time, the Mormon Saints were afraid of retribution for the Massacre at the hands of federal agents. Hamblin may have mistaken the three strangers as federal officers investigating the Mountain Meadows Massacre – after all, a few years later, John Lee, one of the perpetrators of the murders, was captured by federal marshals, peremptorily tried, and, then, shot by firing squad. According to this account, Hamblin again instigated his friendly Indians to do the work of the renegade factions of the LDS. He goaded the Indians into killing the three men based on the misunderstanding that they were federal law enforcement agents investigating the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
No one will ever know for sure what exactly happened. As is the case with all aspects of Mormon history, the facts are obscure and subject to revision by Church authorities. The National Park Service plays it safe by simply indicating that the fate of the three men who abandoned the Powell Expedition in Separation Canyon is unknown. Efforts to cast Mormon pioneers in a bad light often result in claims that historians are “demonizing”the Saints and it remains perilous to criticize Hamblin who was a pivotal figure in the early history of Utah.
North of the Grand Canyon and to the west there is a untraveled zone of wilderness called the Arizona strip – the place has no towns and is crossed by several dirt roads that are impassable after rain or snow. If you are willing to drive for ninety miles on these wide, but eroded country lanes, coming south from St. George, Utah, you will reach a conical mountain rising over the arid plateau. The mountain, is teepee-shaped and wooded up to its summit, a round cone of smashed boulders. On one of these rocks, a faint inscription, etched by a pen-knife reads DUNN 1869. The marks on the rocks are now almost illegible, but, when photographed, in 2018, they could still be faintly seen. (It is amazing that in this vast wilderness someone was able to find this inscription near the top of an unprepossessing mountain.) You can take a bad four-wheel drive forest road to within a couple of miles of Mount Dieffenbach as the peak is called and it’s an easy scramble up to the top. To prevent vandalism, the etched boulder is unmarked and not easy to find – it will take you at least an hour inspecting the grey sun-burned rocks on the hilltop to see the pale, pencil-thin scratches on the stone. (A clue: the boulder is not on the summit itself.) It’s windy there and ravens defend the heights with their sharp cries. From the peak, you can see the labyrinth of canyons fissuring the plateau, a great fractal structure of gorges within gorges red and yellow spreading across the flat mesa-land to the south. Dunn, apparently, climbed to this height to take bearings. No one was in sight as far as the eye could see – there were no villages, no roads, no settlements of any kind. It was all wilderness then and remains all wilderness to this day.
24.
An extended prose poem that is one of most grand in American literature concludes Powell’s report on
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. The prose sings like something by Herman Melville and, with respect to its invocation of the awful sublime, is similar to Edgar Alan Poe’s
Eureka, also a dithyramb on the vastness of time and space. This part of the book is Powell’s original report to the Smithsonian Institute and it is magnificent.
The last picture in the volume is an analytical sketch showing the so-called Great Uncomformity at the Grand Canyon, a peculiar geological phenomenon also named Powell’s Uncomformity. (The double-page views of the canyon, schematically represented so as to show the layering of strata in gorge’s rocks, are fantastically – if, perhaps, inadvertently – beautiful. The sinuous undulating lines, the profiles of temple-buttes and gorges all have something of the crisp, linear beauty of the wood cuts in the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphilia, Flaxman’s illustrations for the
Iliad or the graphic work of Aubrey Beardsley. Unlike the rather forbidding and lowering engravings in the body of the text, these images are pale and remarkably clear and exercise their own quasi-mathematical fascination.) Powell’s Unconformity is a gap in the geological record as exhibited by rock strata at the canyon. Simply put, there are no intervening layers of rock between the Tonto Group, the sequence of strata that comprise the rim and much of the upper canyon, and so-called Vishnu Basement Rocks. The Vishnu formations are vastly ancient metamorphic rocks, different varieties of marble, schist, and gneiss that date to primordial terra-forming when the planet was young and covered with a scarlet cloak of magma. Between the Vishnu Basement formations and the Tonto Group (mostly sedimentary lime- and sandstones clotted with fossils), an interval of 1.2 to 1.75 billions of years intervene without any strata marking the geological events in that period. (In some areas of the canyon, an uplifted ancient rock complex called the Grand Canyon Supergroup, slightly younger than the Vishnu metamorphic layers, exists as the platform for the much newer Tonto Group – but, again, the geological record is missing about one billion years in these areas of the Great Uncomformity.)
I’m not sure that I can accurately describe theories accounting for the Uncomformity. In general, it seems that after the creation of the Vishnu Basement rocks (and the Grand Canyon Supergroup), water appeared in liquid form on the face of the planet and the earth, at least in the zone represented by the Canyon, was covered by immense cratonic seas. A “craton”is a stable basement rock, that is a very hard and resistant platform that forms a shield in the earth’s crust. The notion is that water filled basins between uplifted mountain – both the mountain-building and the sea-formation occurred atop the unyielding basement formations. For eons, mountains of softer stone were eroded away filling the seas which, also, migrated atop the impermeable basement formations. All of this orogenic (mountain building) activity resulted in cycles of deposit and erosion of sedimentary rock. Ultimately, all of this sedimentary rock was macerated into sand by the action of weather and time and, therefore, does not leave a record in the strata. This results in an uncomformity in which the softer, more modern rocks – created in the last 500 million years – float atop the Vishnu Basement complex, a structure of unrelenting rock that forms a craton or impermeable crust.
25.
Many years ago, I took some depositions in Salina, Kansas. After my work was concluded, I drove a few miles to see some geological formations at a place called Rock City. The landscape in this part of Kansas is flat with wheat fields lined by shelter belts of live oak and elm trees. The country is dry without lakes except for lagoons impounded behind old concrete dams thrown across some of the sluggish creeks and rivers. The landmarks in this area are grain elevators, big shapely ranks of concrete bins like immense pipe organs standing under the turbulent skies. Sunflowers crowd the country lanes and, on the day I toured the Rock City, the air was humid, mostly with the exhalations of crops planted in the fields.
There was no sign of any “geology” – the rocks in this part of Kansas were buried deep under the soil and, even, the streams didn’t expose stone, only muddy depths that were ribbed in some places with pale pinkish sand. But, in the middle of this place, a few miles from a tiny hamlet called Minneapolis, a flat meadow was inexplicably adorned with grey spheres of stone, round as billiard balls but with rough wind-bitten surfaces. The stones didn’t really seem extruded from the soil –they were just scattered in irregular groups, rolled here across an area the size of a couple football fields. Some trees grew between the stones, but mostly they were exposed to view, radiating heat when I came upon the place. No one was at the site – there was a tiny gravel parking lot, a sort of kiosk without an attendant, and a picnic shelter with a garbage can overflowing with pizza boxes and beer bottles where big bees were buzzing contentedly. The rock spheres were about ten to fifteen feet high, placid-looking like grazing cows – some of them were marked with torch-like graffiti, red and yellow letters on the lower slopes of the stone balls. I put a dollar in a honor-box and, then, strolled among the rock spheres. A mimeographed sheet of paper contained a geological explanation for the phenomenon – an account that was completely lucid and that seemed totally implausible to me. My principal question was simple enough: why here? The flat grassy field where the rocks were gathered looked no different from any of the other pastures and meadows and crop-lands all around the site. I could look to the horizon and not see any similar deposits of house-sized stone spheres. Why were they gathered in this place? What was different from the hundreds of thousands of square miles around this place where no such formations were found? The geological speculation seemed reasonable enough to me but it didn’t account for the fact that, if true, the entire landscape should have been littered with these huge whimsical stone balls.
On a much vaster scale, the Grand Canyon poses a similar conundrum. The place is freakish. At first, you take pictures with your cell-phone as a witness, to persuade yourself that this enormous hole in the earth is real, a tangible place and not some kind of fantastic dream. Initially, considerations of beauty don’t enter into the equation. The place confronts you – it dares you to disbelieve in it. The rim poses an insuperable barrier. You pass along the rim like someone inspecting a vast mural that is all, more or less, the same. Someone can explain to you how this happened, why this is all here, but those explanations don’t really seem adequate to the size of the place, its peril and danger, the temptations that it poses, it’s history that seems some kind of weird projection of the fears and dreams of those who have come to behold the canyon. I have explained the Great Uncomformity – but my explanation doesn’t bear the slightest conviction for me. It’s what someone has told someone else who, then, told me. You should figure this out for yourself, but, quickly enough, you realize that you don’t have the resources – the canyon, like the rock spheres in Kansas, is nature as other. Whatever is going on here, doesn’t have any relationship to human beings – even our religion is inadequate.
26.
An ancestral Pueblo ruin, called Tusayan, has been partially excavated about four miles from the rim in the pinon pine and juniper forest. The pueblo is unassuming – maybe a twenty people lived here in a complex of stone-walled chamber for, perhaps, a hundred years. It was a quiet place when I visited: snow encrusted some of the shady hillsides and puddled in the closet-sized granary enclosures flanking the slightly larger living areas. At one time, the pueblo may have had two stories but this is all hard to imagine from the scatter of field-stones marking the site. Because of its proximity to the canyon’s south rim, this is the most visited prehistoric ruin in the country – but, in fact, there’s not much to see: two shallow kivas with sipapu pits and some flat stones configured to draw smoke out of the ceremonial spaces, knee-deep drifts of pale stone that mark walls, a swampy-looking swale where there is some storm-flattened grass showing yellow and green between flesh-colored knolls of pebbly soil dotted by contorted trees – prehistoric seed shows that crops were grown in this flattened arroyo. To the south, the snow-covered San Francisco peaks have pitched their lodges on the horizon and they catch the morning sun and reflect it back into the sky. Presumably, this vista was also enjoyed by the prehistoric people who raised up the walls here and made pots and baskets in the little plaza and, I suppose, hunted the mesa for rabbits and deer.
Most of the site has been left unreconstructed and unexcavated. In the groves of pinon a dozen yards away more stones outcrop, the walls of outbuildings presumably. There’s a little museum in a square shed fronted with gravel-encrusted concrete. Some display-cases show pots. Different people lived here – in some places, there is a yellow-ware marked with geometric patterns that probably depict lightning bolts, rain on the mountains, the theorems of fields where corn and squash and beans were grown. The so-called
Cohino people, contemporary with the Anasazi (ancestral Pueblo) also roamed this rolling and forested hills – they left big-bellied, crude-looking pots characteristically colored red-ocher, a variant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Cherokee Red.” One case displays an elegant Navajo necklace, made from silver beaten into a squash-blossom pattern. In the center of the dim room, two or three inch animal figures, deer, it seems, lizards, and, even, birds, have been woven from yucca strands or reeds – the sort of material that would be used to make baskets. The animal fetish figures, if that is what they are, were found below the rim in deep caves in the canyon and they are very ancient, almost 4000 years old. The woven beasts were found in chambers windy with flying Mexican long-tailed bats, where the darkness is eternal – obviously, people took care in placing these tiny offerings in the womb of the earth. The first people had come from a hole somewhere in the depths of the canyon and, perhaps, if the caves were properly inseminated with images of deer and other animals, the earth would give forth those creatures as well.
27.
On the afternoon after I visited the ruin, I walked along the rim for three miles. Even in February, many people visit the National Park and there was always someone with me on the path, either ahead or behind or, even, passing because I tend to walk at a slow, contemplative pace. Ravens accompanied me as well, rising and falling like big black balloons over the places where people congregated, scavenging food from the trash, and crying out to one another as they glided from scrub pine to pine or ventured out over the rim. The depths of the canyon pushed up against the trail in many places and there were alarming abysses only a few yards from where I was walking.
Perhaps, you have had this dream – I think it is common. You are following a trail in a landscape that is very well-known to you, a place where you have lived for years, if not all your life. Then, suddenly, the trail takes a turn that seems slightly unfamiliar and you find yourself perched on the edge of a horrifying declivity. You have come too far and the trail is so steep that it seems to be pulling you forward into the chasm. How did this happen? Why did the ground suddenly fall out from under your feet. You would like to retrace your steps but the trail behind you is so sheer that you can’t really go in that direction and, in any event, the abyss below you imposes itself as a magnetic compulsion, an attraction that you can’t really resist.
The paved trail on the canyon rim is about 10 feet wide. At one place, I saw some cracks extending laterally across the trail’s surface. The fissures in the asphalt guided my eye to a notch in the trail on the cliff-side of the path. I approached the notch and discovered that the bucket-sized crater at the edge of the trail dropped down into a vertical chute running between fluted cliffs of pale yellow stone to a drop off about 30 feet straight below the edge of the path. The drop-off must have been, in fact, an overhang because there was nothing beyond the man-sized chute but the canyon floor, probably about 2000 feet below, a raw tilted immensity dotted with sage. That notch in the trail was certainly large enough to swallow a child and, if you slipped into the cavity, the smooth-looking chute in the cliff-face would deliver you like a torpedo to the pour-off where, then, you would fall 2000 feet into the canyon, propelled downward as if shot from a cannon. The danger was imminent, present, and only a few feet away. I shuddered and felt like I had entered into a dream-space where a sudden descent had suddenly recommended itself and, even, taken a toe-hold in my imagination and where the placid and level ground underfoot was now hollow and about to deliver me into the naked space above the canyon’s depths.
28.
Mathers Point is an outlook over the canyon located the distance of a couple football fields from the principal Visitor Center. A broad paved lane leads from the enormous parking lots adjacent to the Visitor Center to the point. I came upon the overlook from the West as I walked along the rim trail. Like many of these scenic overlooks, a concrete causeway broad enough for a single car to pass leads between deep amphitheater-like abysses to a narrow promontory where a viewing platform hangs over the precipice. It’s ten or twelve miles across to the north rim, a black mark across the middle of the sky suspended above buttes sharp as Clovis points and outlined by shadowy blue depths.
It would take an artist with the inspiration of Hogarth to depict the crowds swarming the causeway and encircling the viewing platform jutting out over the precipice. Shirtless men have crawled over the guard rails and are hanging over the abyss, hooting like apes, and a woman is posing her small trembling dog on a guardrail above a thousand-foot drop and, then, there are daredevils of all kinds, both men and women, who are squatting on the cliffs, some of them dangling their feet over a couple thousand feet of empty space, so that, now and then, I suppose, a Nike or New Balance tennis shoe slips loose and pirouettes downward into the red and green canyon. Asian tourists are aiming at their own sunburnt, grinning faces with selfie-sticks and backing up toward the precipice while other mobs of Chinese and Japanese scream warnings to them and small children, who have escaped from their mother’s hand-hold, are slipping through the railing to dance on the edges of the cliffs and, everywhere, the more cautious tourists are shouting with alarm, high-pitched shrieks that echo and rebound off the curved amphitheater walls and that are sufficiently startling to cause those too close to the edge to jump and twitch so that stones on the brink are jittered down into the depths, dropping silently to who knows where since things cast over the rim will fall so far that they will drop out of sight and, at last, perish in the canyon unseen. The sun is high overhead and the place has the ambience of a county fair and smells of unwashed flesh and sweat and beer (many of the daredevils are quite obviously drunk) and, far away in the parking lots, horns are honking and. above paved trails crowded with humanity, black birds with yard-long wingspans and bright black glittering eyes are prancing around the overflowing garbage bins and fluttering lazily from juniper to juniper. Lost water-bottles rest in the brush and bright pop cans catch the glint of the sun and voices shriek with amazement and fear and, somewhere, a lad in shorts, wearing a baseball cap sideways on his skull, is lowering himself over the rim for a super-special picture that his timorous girlfriend is making, cell-phone held up over her head, as the boy rappels down the sheer cliff on a couple of greasy rags knotted together, feet touching the void.
A few of the Asian tourists are wearing green-blue surgical masks. There’s too much danger here and I turn away, not so much in disgust, but fear – who wants to see someone plunge over the edge?
29.
Here is the simple, unanswerable question that the canyon poses? What’s down there below the rim?
The National Park Service regards all of the canyon as “back-country,” generally unsuitable for entry by most people. Descending below the rim requires stamina and skill and preparation – and most people are incapable of properly preparing for anything. So the National Park Service supplies only scant information as to what might be found in those stony and mysterious depths. No one should be encouraged to venture down into the canyon without an adequate understanding of the dangers involved – that’s the official policy and it drapes the canyon in a kind of secrecy.
And, so, the National Park Service, through its park rangers, hesitates to tell you about Elves Chasm, a mile up the Toltec drainage, where diaphanous waterfalls drizzle through blood-red cliffs cradling green, jungle vegetation, trees hanging in the silvery downpour, above a turquoise-colored lagoon (unfortunately now contaminated with fecal bacteria). Elves Chasm is a 1.5 mile detour on the Royal Bridge trail, up a field of car-sized boulders, an elevation gain from the inner canyon of only 150 feet, but a very difficult, injurious climb on the unstable rocks. And no one will voluntarily tell you about the Hartman Natural Bridge, a huge limestone arch vaulting over a sandy side canyon or the red-walled Siegfried Pyre or the immense fluted walls of the Tower of Ra or Wotan’s Throne that catches clouds that have fallen into the canyon and wraps itself in mist or the Thunder River, the world’s shortest stream, a blast of white water that jets from a cliff and, then, plummets a quarter-mile into the Colorado or the pueblo ruins at Furnace Flats or the old West artifacts on Horsethief Trail that ends in a hidden gorge where an old blacksmith forge can be found and stone walls to confine rustled livestock or the cliff-dweller granaries that gaze over the canyon with their ancient eyes, dark windows in the stone that has been stacked up under the billowing red arch of Tapeats sandstone or the other burial grounds and slot canyons and middens on the edge of the water and the eroded banks extruding sherds of elegant ceramic and, high on the cliff-side the torrents pouring out of Cheyava Falls, seasonally only, but when in full spate, a mighty waterfall crashing down 800 feet into the gorge...
If you go below the rim, you will find that the entire aspect of the landscape changes. From the overlooks, the canyon is all compressed together, telescoped into a foreshortened perspective of cliffs and gorges all pressing up close to the rim from which you are viewing this spectacle. But from below, space opens out – the lone hiker traverses mighty terraces blazing in the sun and the cliffs above look like remote mountains and there are vast stony fields, tilted meadows of high chaparral where jackrabbits move like summer lightning and, below, really no sense of confinement at all, the canyon expands into huge distance, miles between cliffs and striated buttes, broad deserts to be crossed to reach the pale blue shadows of the high escarpment. A hiker hears his breathing and some times sings out to amuse or frighten the ravens, but otherwise there is a great and ponderous silence, a sense that even the wind is afraid to whisper here, and, then, you will see a girl in a white dress walking up some ancient stone steps, worn and almost pale as her skirts, and, if you follow her, she will lead you to a height that seems to soar in the sky but, that is, below other awesome heights, a stylus of stone where there is a Mormon harem, a polygamous settlement made from silver Airstream trailers that must have been airlifted down here, or brought on the white crest of the river, some log cabins and pens for the Tennessee mules and a few battered jeeps and the girls inviting you to their shade, the bowers of the Mormon garden, where you will be bathed and given Fresca to drink and invited to sample the earthly delights on offer here, and, then, if you escape that sanctuary, and follow the faint trails into the blazing marble furnaces of the inner gorge, there at the very base of these thrones of Zion, you will encounter a door, an iron door in an iron frame inset in the cliff wall the color of flame, and, ordinarily, I will assure you that this door is padlocked shut, but, perhaps, upon your arrival there, below the rim, the padlock may be knocked awry and the door into the cool darkness is half ajar...
30.
On our last night at the canyon, Julie and I had Mexican food at Fred Harvey’s Hamburgers at Bright Angel Lodge. It was dark when we left and made our way to the Kachina Lodge where we were staying. The lights along the rim-walk were dim, but it was cloudy and the vast spectacle of the night- sky was veiled. The canyon was a lightless void. There are no lights to the north, particularly at this time of the year when the North Rim is inaccessible due to snow.
Someone was crouched on the very edge of the rim, a dark shape on a deadly brink that we couldn’t see.
Why would someone approach the abyss that closely, particularly in this impenetrable gloom? The sentinel peering into the darkness was motionless. Somewhere, a raven made a scornful laughing sound.
31.
We left the canyon around dawn. Rifts of red and yellow light were exploring the canyon otherwise grey and dour in the shadows. An ambulance was drawn up to one of the dormitory-like lodgings and a fat raven, like a gargoyle, sat on the cornice of the building.
32.
Back in Minneapolis at the airport, fields of snow line the runways. In the toilet at the baggage claim, someone has dropped a light-blue surgical mask. It rests like a fallen leaf against the tile wall near a gaping stall.
Aren’t you tempted? Aren’t you tempted to pick up the dropped mask and press it against your own face and, then, squeeze it like a lemon so that all of its juice drizzles between your lips? Come now, you’ve seen the ravens. Don’t you want to go below the rim?
March 23, 2020
