GARNISHING THE GRAND CANYON
BY MATT WHELAN
“Where y’all guys from?” asks the guard with a viscous Southern twang.
“Canada,” we reply from the cool confines of the car.
“I knew it! I just knew it!” he says through white teeth that gleam in the desert sun.
“Right on!” We say, “how so?!”
“Oh, I talk to a lot of Canadians! Y’all so polite and cheerful,” he explains, “and I just know I don’t have to tell y’all to leave your guns in the car, ‘cause y’all don’t have any, am I right?!”
He certainly was.
But what it might be, here at the entrance to ‘Grand Canyon West’, that would compel us or anyone else to arm themselves was hard to understand.
But then there’s a lot that’s hard to understand when it comes to the way we engage the world and its wonders, and it seems sometimes there is no place on Earth to which humankind is unwilling to add an unnecessary touch.
Niagara Falls, the colossal wet jewel of the Americas, finds itself festooned with a flashy cluster of casinos, haunted houses, Ferris wheels, and golf courses. The once desolate and hallowed slopes of Mount Everest are today littered with more than forty tonnes of expeditionary garbage. On a pedestal atop a peak in Rio de Janeiro, one hundred vertical feet of reenforced concrete Jesus lords over the harbour. And here, at the western end of the Grand Canyon, we have seen fit to install the ‘Skywalk’, a plexiglass overhang that juts out over the ancient gorge, shamelessly, like a giant sun visor.
Must we accessorize? What do we think we’re doing? Does Mother Nature need a nose job?
The Grand Canyon is big. Very big. If you were to pour all the world’s rivers into the Grand Canyon, it wouldn’t be halfway full. You could follow all those rivers up with the contents of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and it would only just be reaching its brim. You could fit Luxembourg into the Grand Canyon, if you were so enabled and inclined. Twice. Two-and-a-bit Mount Kilimanjaros is another way to put it, as is thirty-seven Dead Seas. Or 309 billion 1966 Ford Mustangs, the car that Thelma and Louise drove into the canyon at the bittersweet end of Ridley Scott’s early ‘90s classic.
But while everyone can agree that the Grand Canyon is big, there is no universal agreement on exactly which elements and circumstances conspired to form it. The leading idea today is that a massive and ancient lake, bigger than today’s Lake Michigan, formed in what is today the northeastern corner of Arizona. One day, about five and a half million years ago, it broke one of its banks, and thirteen thousand cubic kilometres of water began crashing westward, cutting the Earth as it went. During the millennia that followed, other lakes would form and then breach, and each ensuing exodus of water would gouge another crevice from the ground, over and over, scooping and scraping out the 450-kilometre-long scratch in the planet’s rind that we see today.
It is a place of staggering enormity that needs witnessing over words, and on pronouncing the area a national monument in January of 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
It seems we begged to differ, and wherever private enterprise can encroach, it does.
Along with the ‘Skywalk’, there are ziplines, river rafts, airplane tours, guided hikes, Hummer excursions, hotel packages, photography treks, skydiving, astronomy outings, mule rides, gift shops, and, of course, an IMAX.
You can take a Biblical Creation Tour, if you like, and be reassured that the canyon is not, in fact, a geological feature millions of years in the making, but hard evidence of the Great Flood described in Genesis.
And here, at an airport just outside the park’s southern rim, ‘Fly Me to The Moon’ croons from our headsets as the rotors of an Airbus H130 helicopter begin to spin up, the pilot flicks at the switches, and we rise slowly into the air.
As we fly low over the thin flat forest of pinyon pines that curtains the canyon and approach the rim, Frank Sinatra has been replaced by Kenny Loggins. By the time we’re dropping over the edge we are in the full-throated, unabashed throes of the ‘Danger Zone’.
The gushing soundtrack does little to erode our awe as the chopper swings through the layered ravines.
Vast, sandwiched striations of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks of various ancient ages scroll past the bulbous windows, a spooned out, topographical layer cake of dusty reds and rusted yellows. Roughly a mile beneath us the cobalt snake of the Colorado River curls across the Earth, getting on with its eons-long excavations.
The Grand Canyon is forecasted to remain recognizable as such for tens of millions of years, and we may be unlikely, as a species, to outlast it.
The record for the longest-existing mammalian species is held by the echidna, a sort of miniature porcupine that has been prowling the Australian night for at least 20 million years and perhaps as many as 50. It has no internal combustion engines, religions, or nuclear weapons, and looks set to continue its quiet and respectable existence for unknowable generations to come.
Humans, it could be argued, are a more volatile bunch, and it’s not impossible that, before our time, we careen into some sort of environmental or radioactive oblivion of our own making.
But long-term existential concerns aside, there may be some comfort to be taken in the relative permanence of the Grand Canyon.
There may by some far away pocket of time to come when we are gone, along with the ‘Skywalk’, the ziplines and the river rafts, the helicopters and the hotels, the skydivers and the cameras, the gift shops and the IMAX.
Over on a continent that once was called Australia, echidnas still make their nocturnal sniffings, hiding from dingoes and looking for ants, while in a corner of what once was called Arizona; river, wind, and rain continue wearing away at the world, carving and extending the manifold valleys of what once was called the Grand Canyon. Unmolested and unadorned.
But who can know the future. Perhaps the human race lives on, and the Grand Canyon of the far future is filled with hover boat trips and android guides, floating hotels, hydrogen-fueled Hummer trips, jetpack tours and rides on robotic mules.
Who knows.
In the meantime, might I leave you with a few more words from Theodore Roosevelt.
“You cannot improve on it,” he said in 1908, adding, “What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.”
MATT WHELAN is a freelance travel writer and photographer. You can find more of his work and connect with Matt on IG @mattwhelan1979, or on his website, mattwhelan.ca