To be in the West you ultimately must be in a place of grand scale. You must be in a place of cloud scraping mountains, jagged and sharp. You must be on a limitless plain interrupted only by the occasional wash or draw or coolie. You must be awed by canyons, dug and scraped out of the plateau by the relentless and timeless abrasion of water, the life-giving earthly element that is so rare and precious here.
We are on the Colorado Plateau now and though we have traipsed across its edges during last summer and earlier during this winter, we are dead square in the middle of it now. This huge plateau that covers so much territory west of the Rockies is a labyrinth of canyons and draws. Everywhere is the evidence of life-giving water, yet it is so elusive to find here. Water is the most powerful substance here on the Plateau, yet the arid landscape appears water-starved most of the time. When it comes, it comes fast and hard, usually in the form of summer monsoons. Rocks in the bottom of the canyons and in the draws are water-rounded. In Missouri, where water is a plentiful thing, the rocks are jagged on the river’s edge. Such a contrast between the two environments, Midwest vs West: Muddy, wet, green, soft, growing, new … vs dusty, dry, orange, red, ocher, plum, sienna, jet, harsh, cutting, chiseled, scoured, ancient beyond comprehension.
The Colorado Plateau, like its very young sister, the Ozark Plateau, was thrust upward by unimaginable forces over millions of years after billions of years of silt and animal debris had settled and been compressed into solid stone. Then, water began to take its relentless toll on the surface, scratching and digging and pushing and shoving all elements in its way, deeper and deeper and deeper. No surface is too hard to oppose the endless push. The result is a time capsule of earth’s history. In Grand Canyon you can find rocks that nearly as old as earth itself. The scale of these canyons in terms of size, deepness, and history is beyond our ability to compartmentalize. We cannot get our minds around it. We can only experience it. I think that is the best thing a person can do here on the Plateau. Release your mind’s natural tendency to evaluate and categorize, and compare. Simply experience it. Let it pull you into its mysteries and ancient of ancients. This is planet earth exposed in its near entirety, exposed by the most powerful force on earth, and in this place, the most scarce and precious.
These are National Parks, Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon. As such, millions of people come to fill their senses with their majesties every year, mostly compacted into 6 month seasons. This means that when you visit, unless you travel to extreme areas of these parks, you will be assimilated into crowds. Your ability to find serenity among the throngs will be challenging. You can certainly find your peaceful..or adventurous place here, but you will need to be patient with the urban-like atmosphere at certain areas. During Spring this year we found a mostly international arena of people here. Whether that is because Americans typically take their vacations during the Summer months and are not here yet I’m unsure. I can tell you by non-statistical and casual observation that 1 in 3 are not speaking English. This adds to the diversity of the geography by making the diversity of cultures apparent as well. We like that a lot. If we as Americans sometimes take our National Parks for granted, folks from around the world do not.
These crowds create dilemmas for the caretakers of these places:
- How do you control the crowds?
- How do you provide for their safety? (Just yesterday three people died in the Grand Canyon National Park. Two fell off the rim to their death and one was found in the outback, cause of death yet unknown)
- How do you protect that which you are compelled to protect while making it available to everyone?
- What is a higher priority...giving all the visitors access as well as comfort, or preserving the stark and harsh environment the way it was before westward expansion?
- Where will the money come from to support all these decisions?
There are surely many more questions about priorities.
We can see the managers taking some measures already to address these issues. In Zion, for example, you can only take clean-running buses to most areas of the park. To allow passenger cars to clog the narrow canyon would be unconscionable. The system works very well, but, it is a compromise in your wilderness experience. In the Grand Canyon to book a Mule trip to the bottom of the canyon and back you must reserve at least a year in advance. Six months is the minimum amount of time needed to book a spot for an RV. Curio shops dot the South Rim, an intrusion on your experience. Surely they are tastefully done and offer, for the most part, good quality merchandise...even hand-crafted items from the local tribes of Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi. It’s a compromise on your experience, however. Some folks hate it while others crave it. Still, the National Parks are there for principal reasons. I have to say that the caretakers do a superb job of educating, and managing the crowds. They are folks who are passionate about their work, so often missing in the cities back East among the money-ginning jobs we all must somehow embrace.
Drawing again upon the diversity of cultures here at Grand Canyon, I’ll relate a little story. Last evening, as the sun was beginning to set, Diane and I took the doggies for a walk back behind the Trailer Village into the forest of pinon and Ponderosa pine. A beautiful and peaceful walk, no one was out there at that time, or so we thought. Out of the forest walked three young men. One, Brandon, was Navajo, one, Lance, was White Mountain Apache, and the other, Mo, was Caucasian from California...or as Moe put it, “just a white guy from California.” They were all workers here in this homogeneous atmosphere of cooperative workers. They were out as we were, just enjoying each other’s company and the great outdoors, They had just been to some kind of seminar or meeting of the workers. We all stopped and talked for a good while about who we were and where we were from. It was such a pleasant meeting. Lance began to teach us the Apache dialect by describing Apache words for this and that….dog, face, lips, eyes, and so on. What struck me were the sounds his mouth made that were not possible by any letters in the English language. It seems such a difficult language to me. Brandon told me that the Apache language and his native Navajo were similar...just different dialects so to speak. When Lance told me about how he came to be here in Grand Canyon, away from his family, he briefly came to tears. He said, “ My father doesn’t even know I’m here.” I didn’t ask why. I just listened and tried to be empathic. Lance is also a fire fighter and has fought wild fires for thirteen seasons. Brandon, un-pressured by anyone to speak, told us how he came to be here and how he was a cook at one of the restaurants. Such openness in the midst of strangers. It was a nice and memorable meeting of once strangers in an out of the way area of a National Park… a chance meeting. We’ll not forget it, ever.