Day seven - The Grand Canyon

Day Seven – 18th May - The Grand Canyon

I’m clinging to a rock face, fingers tightly curled around a sturdy crag, toes carefully placed along a small ridge, body pressed close to the surface and I have a 6000ft vertical drop behind me.

How have I done this? Why am I doing this? You may be perplexed: you’re reading about a twenty-something, literature student whose epic incompetence when it comes to hiking is well-documented. Only now, she’s climbing up a rocky, red ridge. Well, Grand Canyon does this to you – it robs you of any common sense. You want to throw yourself off because you can’t believe you’ll ever hit the bottom. You can’t help but wonder if this great dry split-in-the-earth could possibly have anything living in it and ponder in puzzlement over the hawks drawing lines in the sky. You stare hard enough and the distance between the many sides blur into one continuous scene.

The Grand Canyon is beyond language. I’m writing this on the bus to Monument Valley and my hands are sore from writing postcards trying to detail my awe at the place.

 Sunset: we watched as the canyon filled up with shadows, followed the shifting colours with our eyes as the ruddy hues of umber rock shimmered yellow in the last glimpses of the sun before burning a deep red  and then dulling into darkness.. Standing on the edge, looking out over the rim – the depth is unfathomable, incomprehensible to the mind. The ineluctable modality of the visible. Far, far away from our feet, you can see the last shimmer of the river as it catches sunlight like a mirror, blinking once, twice, no more. Tufts of coarse brush, shiver in the mild wind that’s quickly catching an chill.

Sunrise: it’s so cold, Maggie hoots her horn and off to the Canyon for the miasma of colours to rise again from the dark, gaping rift in the earth. The sky bursts with blue and a yellow line presses upwards from the horizon. So many shades, the sea of shadow begins to churn: deep blood red on the canyon cliffs, the umber bursting with gold and yellow and orange. Which is more beautiful? The sky as it blushes a rosy dawn or the canyon as she wakes, pencil scribble birds circling upwards but never out? 

We walk along the Rim Trail to Bright Angel Lodge – laughing at the surreal vision of Grand Cayon, imagining Ansel Adams trying to capture this on film and wondering if he felt the same strange head-space when the moment simply cannot be described  in any true form. If we had more days we could have hiked right into the Canyon along the Bright Angel Trail, down to the silver slither of river at the bottom, walked along the banks and dipped out toes in the rapid waters. We watched an IMAX film about the River – about the one-armed adventurer who first traced the full length of the Colorado rushing along the bottom. John Wesley Powell – geologist, soldier and diarist – his journey took 3-months. Incredible. I'd love to do the two-week river trip sometime too. 

In other news, we picked up a new passenger in Vegas – his name is Dave and he’s another GAdventure guy (in fact he’s Maggie’s higher-up). Loud, funny, joining right in with all the silly jokes and banter, he makes incredible percolated coffee for everyone in the morning and has kindly offered to tweet out my blog for me to the G-tours followers.

 And before the boys catch me out – we didn’t actually climb up the Grand Canyon – we were just posturing.

I’ll write again soon. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie, 
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