Chapter XII · THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO RIVER IN ARIZONA

From Williams, on the Santa Fe’s transcontinental line, a branch runs due north across 65 miles of the great Colorado Plateau and lands the traveler at the very rim of the Grand Cañon—one of the most enjoyable, most novel, most awakening sights among the Southwest’s marvels. Even if your arrival be at darkest midnight, you will feel the nearness of that awful void in the unseen—a strange and humbling experience. For accommodations you have the choice of American plan and what passes in the wilderness for luxury at the big El Továr Hotel,[77] or of lodging yourself more economically but comfortably enough in cabin or tent at 151 the nearby Bright Angel Camp with meals á la carte at the Harvey Café. Then you will want to know what to see.

The Grand Cañon is among those stupendous natural wonders that the traveler needs time to adjust himself to; and I am inclined to believe that his first act in wisdom is to sit down at the rim with a comprehensive map before him and spend a leisurely hour studying geography. Fortunately a very good practical map is included in the Santa Fe’s folder that describes the Cañon, and this may be had of any agent for the asking. The names, taken from all sorts of mythologies and philosophies—Hindu, Chinese, Norse, British, Greek, Egyptian, with a dash of Aztec and latter day American—and given to the various prominent shapes simulating temples, pagodas, castles, towers, colonnades and what not, are rather bewildering and indeed seem out of place in mid-Arizona. In better taste, I think, are the more simply named spots that commemorate adjacent native tribes as Hopi, Walapai, Zuñi; old white dwellers by the rim like Bass, Rowe and Hance; and explorers associated 152 with the Cañon, such as Powell, Escalante and Cárdenas. Cárdenas, it may not be amiss to state, was the officer dispatched by Coronado from Zuñi to learn the truth about the great gorge and river, the report of which Tovar had brought him from the Hopis. It was Cárdenas and his little company of a dozen soldiers, who, one autumn day of 1540, were the first white men to look into the mighty chasm. At the bottom they could detect the great river flowing, seemingly a mere thread of a rivulet; but their attempts to reach it were fruitless, so precipitous they found the Cañon walls.[78] The stream that first received the name of Colorado, is the one we now call Little Colorado. Oñate dubbed it so—Spanish for red—because of the color of its turbid waters. The greater river in Cárdenas’s day was known as el Rio del Tizón, the river of the Fire-brand—a name given it by explorers of its lower waters because of certain Indians on its bank whom the 153 Spaniards saw warming themselves with brands taken from the fire. The Colorado River as we now know it, and including its tributaries the Grand and the Green, drains a region only secondary to the basin of the Mississippi. Its length from the headwaters of the Green in Wyoming to the outlet into the Gulf of California is about 2000 miles. The Grand Cañon (including 65 miles above the junction with the Little Colorado and known as Marble Cañon) is 283 miles in length, the walls varying from 3000 to nearly 6000 feet high and rising from the river in a series of huge steps or terraces, so that the width, which at the river is from about 100 to 600 feet, increases to several miles at the rim. The deepest part of the chasm is near the hotels, and the river there flows over a mile below them.[79] 154 The Cañon walls are the delight of geologists, who find there in orderly arrangement (stratum upon stratum in banded colors) the deposits of the successive ages of the earth from the archaean granite to the lava flows of recent geologic time. A succinct and readable account of the geological features of the Cañon will be found in the United States Geological Survey’s admirable Guide Book of the Western United States, Part C—a book of especial value to the car-window observer on the Santa Fe route.

Trains to the Cañon are arranged so that travelers may reach it in the early morning and leave the same evening. In a way this is unfortunate, for it offers a temptation, almost irresistible to an American tourist, to “do” the place in a day and go on to some other sight. Of course no one can do it in a day, but he can do certain things, and he can get a notion of the general scheme. Three days at least would best be planned for, and of course more still would be better. The principal features that should not be missed, may be summed up as follows: A 155 horseback trip down into the Cañon by either Bright Angel Trail or the Hermit Trail; the drive (15 miles the round) over the Hermit Rim road; the auto trip (26 miles the round) to Grand View Point. There are, moreover, several short drives of four or five miles by public coach to vantage points along the rim, costing a dollar or two per passenger; and of course walks innumerable, among which that to Hopi Point, about 2 miles northwest from the railway terminus, is particularly to be recommended for its sunset view of the Cañon. Another pleasant short rim walk is to Yavapai Point, 1½ miles to the eastward. From both these points the view is superb.

The trip down the Bright Angel[80] trail to the river and back is an all day jaunt. To the tenderfoot it is a somewhat harrowing experience to be borne downward at an angle of 45 degrees more or less on the back of a wobbling animal, whose head at times 156 hangs over eternity, and whose only footing is on a narrow shelf scratched out of a precipitous wall of the Cañon. However, as nothing tragical happens, and as there is no escape once you are started on the descensus Averni, you soon find enjoyment in the novel trip, zigzagging ever downward through successive geologic ages marked by rock strata in white, red, brown and blue.

Something over half way down there is a grateful let-up, when the trail runs out upon a plateau watered by a musical little brook. This place is known as “The Indian Garden.” It is enclosed on three sides by lofty reddish walls, and here some Havasupai Indians are said to have had in comparatively recent times a village, and to have cultivated the land. Long before them, however, en el tiempo de cuanto ha, as the Pueblo story tellers say in poetic Spanish (“in the time of how long ago”), another race must have tilled the same soil, as the near-by cliffs maintain numerous remains of rock dwellings and other evidences of human occupancy. It is a pleasant, flowery, romantic spot, this Indian Garden, in the 157 Cañon’s crimson heart, with its fascinating environment of rock sculpturings that seem the towers, palaces and temples of an enchanted city awaiting the lifting of a spell. At the plateau’s outer edge you have a stupendous view of the colossal gorge and the muddy torrent of the river, leaping and roaring 1300 feet below. You may make the Indian Garden the limit of your descent, or you may continue to the river itself, corkscrewing down among the crevices and rockbound ways and echoes of the inexorable wall until you come out upon a little beach, past which, more terrible than beautiful, the savage torrent thunders and cascades and tears its course to freedom. You will be glad to get into the blessed upper world again, but you would not have missed the experience for a greater cost of clambering.

The Hermit Rim road is a first-class modern highway (so far barred, thank heaven, to automobiles), extending about 7½ miles westward from El Tovar by way of Hopi Point to the Hermit Basin. Part of it passes through beautiful stretches of park-like forest, emerging upon the dizzy brink 158 of the Cañon with magnificent outlooks over chasm and river to distant mountains and cloud-piled sky. If you enjoy walking, it is pleasant to do this trip one way in the public coach and the other afoot by way of Rowe’s Well. The Hermit Rim Road ends at the head of a comparatively new trail to the river, a sort of trail de luxe, 4 feet wide and protected by a stone wall very reassuring to the apprehensive. As on the Bright Angel trail, there is a plateau midway. Here a public camp is maintained, where accommodations for an over-night stay may be had. From this camp to the river must be done afoot—an easy grade, it is said, but I cannot speak from personal knowledge. There is a trail connecting the lower portions of Hermit and Bright Angel trails, so that one may go to the river by one route and return by the other. This consumes 3 days ordinarily, and must be taken as a camping trip with its concomitant ups and downs. It is hardly to be recommended to any but the reasonably robust—and good natured!

Grand View Point, 13 miles east of El 159 Tovar—a beautiful drive that may be done by motor car through the Coconino Forest—is the terminus of the old-time stage route from Flagstaff. The view at the point is perhaps the finest of all—quite different from that at El Tovar and more extended: owing to the greater width between the main walls of the Cañon; to the fact that the river here makes a sharp turn to the north; and the further fact that the relative lowness of the eastern wall of the bend opens up a vista towards the desert, which at El Tovar is hidden. The Grand View round trip with a look-around at Grand View Point may be done in half a day from El Tovar, but if one can afford to give a day or two to it, the material is here to be worth the extra time. Here is a hotel to care for you. Particularly of interest is the trail to Moran Point, some half dozen miles to the east, an exquisite outlook and the view point of Thomas Moran’s famous picture of the Cañon which occupies a place in the Capitol at Washington. There is a trail down to the river from Grand View Point, and another by way of Red Cañon, heading a little 160 to the west of Moran Point. A connecting trail at the bottom of the Cañon makes it possible to descend by one trail and return by the other, if one goes prepared to camp by the river. There are, by the way, several varieties of fish in the Colorado, one, the so-called Colorado salmon,[81] being a good table fish, though the catching involves no sport, as it is not gamey.

The Grand Cañon may be visited at any season, though in winter there is often snow upon the rim and upper levels. Usually there is not enough to interfere seriously with reaching the various points of interest; and as one descends into the gorge, one soon passes out of wintry into warmer and still warmer conditions. Even in December some flowers will be blooming in the bottom of the Cañon. July and August constitute the usual summer rainy season, when frequent thunderstorms are to be expected, particularly in the afternoons. They are 161 usually of short duration. The atmospheric effects accompanying and succeeding them are often magnificent.[82]

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