BY KEVIN FEDARKO
I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough.
— Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground
The U.S. national park system now boasts a network of more than 400 parks, monuments, and other sites, all of them studded like the gemstones of an immense coronation cape whose hemline extends from the coast of Florida to the Pacific Ocean, and whose collar stretches across the neck of the Arctic Circle.
Within the folds of that tapestry, the Grand Canyon falls a notch or two short of the number-one position by almost every metric according to which supremacy is conventionally judged. It fails to qualify as either the first park in the system — a distinction that belongs to Yellowstone — or the largest (Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias is nearly 11 times bigger). Nor does the park rank as the most popular or heavily visited. (Great Smoky Mountains, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee, draws almost twice as many people each year.)
As for the canyon itself, it’s certainly not the deepest declivity on Earth (which is located in Peru or Tibet, depending on how you’re measuring) or the longest (which is on the Indian subcontinent). In fact, it doesn’t even contain the oldest rocks on Earth, which are to be found in Canada.
And yet, few would dispute that this mile-deep abyss in northern Arizona, a vast amphitheater of sun-dappled stone that was sculpted over uncountable eons by the Colorado River, stands not only as the centerpiece of America’s national park system, but also as the signature touchstone of the nation’s topography and its geology. A place whose contours, instantly recognizable to virtually every citizen of this country, affirm it as “one of the great sights,” in the words of President Theodore Roosevelt, “which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.”
Roosevelt’s first encounter with the canyon was exceptionally brief: those words were part of a speech he gave during an eight-hour stopover at the South Rim in May of 1903. Despite the fleeting nature of that visit, however, the force of the canyon’s magnificence — the dignity of its bearing, the austerity of its silences, and, above all, the gorgeous indifference with which its vast interior offers a sweeping backdrop for an endlessly shifting interplay of light and shadow across every hue that can register on the human eye or heart — all of that struck the president like the blow of a hammer.
Indeed, the impact was so powerful it convinced Roosevelt that the best thing one could possibly do with the place was to back off and leave it alone:
“I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon,” he admonished his audience, many of whom were boosters hell-bent on making a buck off the land by mining minerals, harvesting timber, grazing cattle, or fleecing tourists.
“Leave it as it is,” he told them. “You cannot improve on it.”
Whether he realized it or not, when Roosevelt uttered that statement, he was touching upon an abiding truth that has been self-evident to almost anyone who has ever stood on the canyon’s rim, gazed into its depths, and understood that this, more than anything else, is the primary credo that should govern how we treat this space.
~
If the Grand Canyon can be said to have a single defining feature, it is surely the stair-stepped walls of rock that thrust upward like immense palisades from both sides of the Colorado River. Encased within those ramparts, which claw more than a mile into the sky, is a stratified record of the past — more than 26 separate layers of stone — whose history can be deciphered and read much like the pages of a book.
PETE MCBRIDE
The youngest of those layers, which comprise the canyon’s rim, dates back almost 250 million years to a period directly after the greatest catastrophe the world has ever known, an extinction event known as the Great Dying, in which 96 percent of all marine species and almost three-quarters of terrestrial vertebrates were wiped from the face of the Earth.
By contrast, the oldest of those rock layers, the coal-black Vishnu schist that forms the subbasement of the canyon, boasts a bloodline extending back almost 2 billion years, a span of time that represents one-third the age of the planet, and nearly a tenth the lifespan of the universe itself. When that rock was first formed, multicellular organisms had yet to evolve, and the only things alive anywhere on Earth were whorled chains of the earliest cyanobacteria, anaerobic creatures whose chemistry had coalesced shortly after the crust of the planet had begun to cool, a time when the atmosphere was devoid of a single molecule of oxygen.
PETE MCBRIDE
The sweep of stone bracketed between the top and the bottom of the canyon thus represents the finest exposure of rock, over time, anywhere on the planet. And although the value of those walls is often celebrated purely in terms of aesthetics — their shape, their texture, the symphonic pageantry of color that plays across their surfaces each morning and again each evening — the true worth of all that rock and all that time transcends beauty in a way that renders visual delight all but irrelevant.
There are surely places of equal and perhaps, some might argue, even greater loveliness — places as wondrous and varied as the redwood-pillared cathedrals of northern California, the ice-etched escarpments of the Tetons, or the emerald-studded canopies of the Everglades. But nowhere else on Earth are the forces that forged and framed the planet itself revealed with such naked, titanic candor. And by extension, nowhere else on Earth do the works and the aspirations of humankind seem so puny and so insignificant by comparison.
All of which makes for a rather striking irony. Because as Grand Canyon National Park passes over the threshold of its first centennial, this canyon, this monumental testament to the insignificance of mankind, may no longer be able to transmit, with sufficient force, its central and defining insight, the idea that we most need to hear. A message that touches upon the thing we Americans most lack, which is humility.
~
From every point of the compass, from the air above as well as the ground below, the integrity of the Grand Canyon is currently under threat from people seeking to profit from its wonders, cutting directly against the principle that Roosevelt laid out. In so doing, these developers are poised to inflict irreparable harm to the canyon’s treasures, many of which are so deeply buried within its twisted labyrinth of buttes, towers, and tributary drainages that they have been seen by almost no one.
From the east, a group of businessmen hasn’t given up on the idea of a cable-driven tramway capable of delivering up to 10,000 tourists a day from the rim of the canyon to a walkway and restaurant along the river at its bottom.
Members of the Havasupai Tribe outside the fence at Canyon uranium mine, located in a meadow near the tribe's sacred site of Red Butte, south of Grand Canyon National Park. PETE MCBRIDE
Meanwhile, the north and south rims of the canyon are dotted with uranium mines, some defunct and others quite active. The shafts and tailings of those mines, along with a real estate project that is simultaneously being planned for the South Rim, together threaten the aquifers that are responsible for driving many of the springs and seeps that serve as biological linchpins to the ecosystem in the heart of the canyon.
Finally, off to the west, air-tour operators based in Las Vegas are partnering with the Hualapai Tribe to fill the canyon corridor with a daily stream of between 300 and 500 helicopters. These machines — whose noise can be heard from up to 20 miles away virtually without cessation from shortly after sunrise to just before sunset, seven days a week, 365 days a year — are destroying one of the canyon’s most fragile and precious treasures, which is its soundscape of silence.
It’s no exaggeration to say that virtually every part of this vast wilderness — what is recognized by all, what is familiar only to a very few, and what yet remains a secret to everyone — is now for sale. And for this very reason, the canyon also offers up one of the most provocative locations not only to celebrate the riches that America’s national park system contains, but also to take a measure of forces that are now arrayed against those very same parks.
As it turns out, however, that’s a rather tall order.
Thanks to the canyon’s topographic and geologic complexity, cataloguing its hidden wonders while simultaneously gauging the threats that are poised to harm those gems isn’t something that can be pulled off by moving through the canyon’s interior swiftly, or by conventional means.
You simply cannot conduct this kind of assessment by standing on the rim and gazing in (as 6 million visitors do each year), or by flying over the park in a helicopter or a fixed-wing aircraft, as tens of thousands of air-tour passengers do each year. Nor can you accomplish this goal by cruising along the bottom in a boat, as another 26,000 river runners do each year.
PETE MCBRIDE
The bulk of the canyon’s interior consists of a matrix of cliffs and ledges, tributary gorges, and slot canyons that are not only inaccessible from the rims or the river, but also invisible from these vantages. To know this world, you must see it through the eyes of a foot soldier, which is to say, from the ground. And the only way to do that is to cut a transect through the heart of this landscape by carrying your gear and your provisions on your back, and by moving from one hidden pocket of water to the next. Day by day, week by week, month by month, until you have walked from the canyon’s eastern entry point at Lees Ferry to its western terminus at the Grand Wash Cliffs, a distance of nearly 800 miles.
Adding to the many challenges of this approach is the inconvenient fact that there is no path one can follow. In fact, unlike the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, or the Continental Divide Trail, when you are deep inside the Grand Canyon the word “trail” simply doesn’t apply. For the most part, forging a route involves a nightmarish bushwhack across a vertical desert graced by stark ruination and savage beauty, a landscape haunted by far too little water and far too much of God’s indifference to ever make it seem anything but hostile and downright mean.
And that, in a nutshell, is precisely what the photographer and filmmaker Pete McBride set out to do in the autumn of 2015.
~
Pete invited me to tag along with him because we are friends, and because we have had many adventures together. But my presence as a writer was never more than a kind of coda or afterthought. Which, I hasten to add, was entirely fitting, because the canyon is a place where words tend to lose their power and find themselves forced to take a back seat to images.
In this centennial year, Pete’s photos offer up an elegy for an incomparable landscape, a place like no other, and the magic it once held in the palm of its hand.
Kevin Fedarko is the author of The Emerald Mile. In 2016, he completed a sectional thru-hike of the Grand Canyon alongside photographer Pete McBride, a journey they chronicled for National Geographic. This piece is adapted from the introduction to Pete McBride’s photo book, The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim.
Become a member of the Turquoise Circle and receive Pete McBride's new photo-essay book.
