Dreams of Summer and Southwest Travels: A Canyon Grander than All

It's winter, and it's cold outside. I won't be in the field for another six weeks, so for now I'm reveling in the memories of this last summer, a journey through the Southwest states. We started our field studies trip at Hole in the Wall in the Mojave National Preserve, and after spending the morning hiking in Banshee Canyon, we hit the road and moved on to the state border with Arizona. We were on our way to the grandest of all canyons: Grand Canyon.

The canyon is more than 200 miles long, and averages a mile (1.6 km) in depth. It cuts through 1.7 billion years of Earth history. There really is no place in the world like it. It's a spectacle, but it's also one of the world's greatest outdoor laboratories. We arrived late in the day, and strangely enough we had to drive through ice to get there. A fierce hailstorm had dumped inches of ice granules along the highway. We reached the rim as the storm cleared.

As the sun reached the horizon, it peeked out from under the clouds, and the upper canyon walls lit up with soft warm orange light. This wasn't a moment for learning, it was a moment for awe. Most of our students had never been to the Grand Canyon, and they seemed stunned. It's one of the times I love as a teacher, because after the awe comes the questions, and with questions comes true learning. But the learning could wait until tomorrow.

Dispatches from the Road: Cold White Volcanoes and Fiery Red Sunsets

Mostly a day on the highway, making the 400 mile long drive from Tucson to the Grand Canyon. Didn't stop for photos at all, really, except for the moment we crossed a snow covered meadow at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, Arizona's active volcanic field (the last eruption was only 900 or so years ago at Sunset Crater). The peaks reach nearly 13,000 feet, and Humphreys Peak is the highest point in Arizona. They once stood much higher. The stratovolcano lost its summit during a major eruption/avalanche similar to Mt. St. Helens, or from the much slower process of glacial erosion.

We arrived in Grand Canyon in the last moments of a beautiful sunset. The canyon was already falling into shadow, but the sky was on fire all around us.

 Getting some rest tonight, and looking forward to some sightseeing tomorrow!

Fading Into Insignificance: Mather Point, Grand Canyon National Park

In geology, scale is everything. We have a hard time understanding the meaning of a million or billion years when our own personal experience extends across only a few decades. A place like the Grand Canyon seems immutable and unchangeable in a human time frame, but it is simply spectacular what can happen on a time scale of five or six million years. An entire gorge, one of the largest on the planet, can be produced by nothing more than a river flowing and gravity pulling rocks from cliffs. A zoom lens can serve as a metaphor for human existence in the midst of deep time.

It has been my experience that when I look upon a scene of such grandeur, my mind is not fully capable of taking in the true scale of the canyon. The vastness of the scene has been shrunk to a single image in the back of my eye, and my ego makes me much larger in relation to the canyon in front of me. One way to gain a truer sense of scale is to hike the canyon. Nothing drives home the depth of the gorge more than trying to walk back out. It looks a LOT bigger when you stand at the bottom and look up!

On the other hand, one can stand on the rim with a camera, and see what happens to people scaled to the immensity of the canyon. I stood this morning at Mather Point and snapped a shot of people enjoying the view (above).

I was actually some distance away, using a 30x zoom, so I back out to 15x or so, and a strip of the Kiabab Limestone becomes visible. The rock is a mixture of limestone and sandstone that formed in a shallow sea in Permian time, around 250 million years ago.

Zooming out to 7x or so, the cliff grows in size, and the tourists are shrinking into insignificance. The cliff they are standing on is a few hundred feet high, but the real news here is the far rim of the gorge. Do you see the double layer of light colored rock separated by a forested slope? That thin whitish strip across the top is the same Kaibab Limestone! It is one of the thinner layers that makes up the cliffs of the Grand Canyon.

I was about a quarter of a mile away from the people at the viewpoint, and without a zoom they are practically invisible on the upper left. The canyon is ten miles wide, and more than a mile deep. We humans are mere insects in the face of such immensity. The existence of human civilization over the past few thousand years fades into an equal insignificance over the immensity of geologic time. The rocks in the deepest part of the canyon are more than 1.7 billion years old!

I want to pay a compliment to the National Park Service. I was most pleasantly surprised when we arrived at Mather Point this morning. For years, Mather Point was the spot where the majority of visitors saw the Grand Canyon for the first time. There was a crowded parking lot, always noisy, always kind of trashy. It got worse when the NPS completed the new visitor center a few years ago, because Mather was the closest parking lot and consequently the competition for parking spots increased. It was an untenable situation.

When got there today, we discovered a new parking lot and a realigned highway that diverted traffic away from the rim (completed in November). One could park at the visitor center, and take a two minute stroll to see the canyon for the first time. No trash, no noise, just a beautiful rim walk with the silent immensity of the canyon, and the occasional croak of a raven. The people I saw looked reverent instead of hassled. It was a moment of rediscovery, and I want to thank the park service for a job well done.