Part 40

More than a hundred thousand persons visit the Grand Canyon each year. In other lands it is our most celebrated scenic possession. It was made a national park in 1919.

The Grand Canyon is not of America but of the world. Like the Desert of Sahara and the monster group of the Himalayas, it is so entirely the greatest example of its kind that it refuses limits. This is true of it also as a spectacle; far truer, in fact, for, if it is possible to compare things so dissimilar, in this respect certainly it will lead all others. None see it without being deeply moved--all to silence, some even to tears. It is charged to the rim with emotion; but the emotion of the first view varies. Some stand astounded at its vastness. Others are stupefied and search their souls in vain for definition. Some tremble. Some are uplifted with a sense of appalling beauty. For a time the souls of all are naked in the presence.

This reaction is apparent in the writings of those who have visited it; no other spectacle in America has inspired so large a literature. Joaquin Miller found it fearful, full of glory, full of God. Charles Dudley Warner pronounced it by far the most sublime of earthly spectacles. William Winter saw it a pageant of ghastly desolation. Hamlin Garland found its lines chaotic and disturbing but its combinations of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it bestowed a new sense of earth's beauty.

Marius R. Campbell, whose geological researches have familiarized him with Nature's scenic gamut, told me that his first day on the rim left him emotionally cold; it was not until he had lived with the spectacle that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the experience of very many, a fact which renders still more tragic a prevailing public assumption that the Grand Canyon is a one-day stop in a transcontinental journey.

It is not surprising that wonder is deeply stirred by its vastness, its complexity, and the realization of Nature's titanic labor in its making. It is far from strange that extreme elation sometimes follows upon a revelation so stupendous and different. That beauty so extraordinary should momentarily free emotion from control is natural enough. But why the expressions of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired of many of our own day without finding one, even among the most sensitive, whom it repelled. Perhaps a clew is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of an inspired word-picture which the late Clarence E. Dutton hid in a technical geological paper of 1880. "The lover of nature," he wrote, "whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock and dwell there with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful or noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would seem at first only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry or bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent."

I suspect that this repulsion, this horror, as several have called it, was born of the conventions of an earlier generation which bound conceptions of taste and beauty, as of art, dress, religion, and human relations generally, in shackles which do not exist in these days of individualism and broad horizons. To-day we see the Grand Canyon with profound astonishment but without prejudice. Its amazing size, its bewildering configuration, its unprecedented combinations of color affect the freed and elated consciousness of our times as another and perhaps an ultimate revelation in nature of law, order, and beauty.

In these pages I shall make no attempt to describe the Grand Canyon. Nature has written her own description, graving it with a pen of water in rocks which run the series of the eternal ages. Her story can be read only in the original; translations are futile. Here I shall try only to help a little in the reading.

The Grand Canyon was cut by one of the great rivers of the continent, the Colorado, which enters Arizona from the north and swings sharply west; thence it turns south to form most of Arizona's western boundary, and a few miles over the Mexican border empties into the head of the Gulf of California. It drains three hundred thousand square miles of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. It is formed in Utah by the confluence of the Green and the Grand Rivers. Including the greater of these, the Green River, it makes a stream fifteen hundred miles in length which collects the waters of the divide south and east of the Great Basin and of many ranges of the Rocky Mountain system. The Grand River, for its contribution, collects the drainage of the Rockies' mighty western slopes in Colorado.

The lower reaches of these great tributaries and practically all of the Colorado River itself flow through more than five hundred miles of canyons which they were obliged to dig through the slowly upheaving sandstone plateaus in order to maintain their access to the sea. Succeeding canyons bear names designating their scenic or geologic character. Progressively southward they score deeper into the strata of the earth's crust until, as they approach their climax, they break through the bottom of the Paleozoic limestone deep into the heart of the Archean gneiss. This limestone trench is known as the Marble Canyon, the Archean trench as the Granite Gorge. The lower part of the Marble Canyon and all the Granite Gorge, together with their broad, vividly colored and fantastically carved upper canyon ten miles across from rim to rim, a mile high from water to rim-level, the climax of the world of canyons and the most gorgeous spectacle on earth, is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It lies east and west in the northern part of the State.

To comprehend it, recall one of those ditches which we all have seen crossing level fields or bordering country roads. It is broad from rim to rim and deeply indented by the side washes which follow heavy showers. Its sides descend by terraces, steep in places with gentle slopes between the steeps, and on these slopes are elevations of rock or mud which floods have failed to wash away. Finally, in the middle, is the narrow trench which now, in dry weather, carries a small trickling stream. Not only does this ditch roughly typify the Grand Canyon, reproducing in clumsy, inefficient miniature the basic characteristics of its outline, but it also is identical in the process of its making.

Imagining it in cross-section, we find its sides leading down by successive precipices to broad intermediate sloping surfaces. We find upon these broad surfaces enormous mesas and lofty, ornately carved edifices of rock which the floods have left standing. We find in its middle, winding snakelike from side to side, the narrow gorge of the river.

The parallel goes further. It is not at all necessary to conceive that either the wayside ditch or the Grand Canyon was once brimful of madly dashing waters. On the contrary, neither may ever have held much greater streams than they hold to-day. In both cases the power of the stream has been applied to downward trenching; the greater spreading sides were cut by the erosion of countless side streamlets resulting temporarily from periods of melting snow or of local rainfall. It was these streamlets which cut the side canyons and left standing between them the bold promontories of the rim. It was these streamlets, working from the surface, which separated portions of these promontories from the plateau and turned them into isolated mesas. It was the erosion of these mesas which turned many of them into the gigantic and fantastic temples and towers which rise from the canyon's bowl.

Standing upon the rim and overlooking miles of these successive precipices and intermediate templed levels, we see the dark gorge of the granite trench, and, deep within it, wherever its windings permit a view of its bottom, a narrow ribbon of brown river. This is the Colorado--a rill; but when we have descended six thousand feet of altitude to its edge we find it a rushing turbulent torrent of muddy water. Its average width is three hundred feet; its average depth thirty feet. It is industriously digging the Grand Canyon still deeper, and perhaps as rapidly as it ever dug since it entered the granite.

Developing the thought in greater detail, let us glance at the illustrations of this chapter and at any photographs which may be at hand, and realization will begin. Let imagination dart back a million years or more to the time when this foreground rim and that far run across the vast chasm are one continuous plain; perhaps it is a pine forest, with the river, no greater than to-day, perhaps not so great, winding through it close to the surface level. As the river cuts downward, the spring floods following the winter snows cave in its banks here and there, forming sharply slanted valleys which enclose promontories between them. Spring succeeds spring, and these side valleys deepen and eat backward while the promontories lengthen and grow. The harder strata resist the disintegration of alternate heat and cold, and, while always receding, hold their form as cliffs; the softer strata between the cliffs crumbles and the waste of spring waters spreads them out in long flattened slopes. The centuries pass. The ruin buries itself deep in the soft sandstone. The side valleys work miles back into the pine forest. Each valley acquires its own system of erosion; into each, from either side, enter smaller valleys which themselves are eating backward into the promontories.

The great valley of the Colorado now has broad converging cliff-broken sides. Here and there these indentations meet far in the background behind the promontories, isolating island-like mesas.

The rest of the story is simple repetition. Imagine enough thousands of centuries and you will imagine the Grand Canyon. Those myriad temples and castles and barbaric shrines are all that the rains and melting snows have left of noble mesas, some of which, when originally isolated, enclosed, as the marble encloses the future statue, scores of the lesser but mighty structures which compose the wonder city of the depths.

These architectural operations of Nature may be seen to-day in midway stages. Find on the map the Powell Plateau in the northwest of the canyon. Once it was continuous with the rim, a noble promontory. It was cut out from the rim perhaps within the existence of the human race. A few hundred thousand years from now it will be one or more Aladdin palaces.

Find on the map the great Walhalla Plateau in the east of the canyon. Note that its base is nearly separated from the parental rim; a thousand centuries or so and its isolation will be complete. Not long after that, as geologists reckon length of time, it will divide into two plateaus; it is easy to pick the place of division. The tourist of a million years hence will see, where now it stands, a hundred glowing castles.

Let us look again at our photographs, which now we can see with understanding. To realize the spectacle of the canyon, let imagination paint these strata their brilliant colors. It will not be difficult; but here again we must understand.

It is well to recall that these strata were laid in the sea, and that they hardened into stone when the earth's skin was pushed thousands of feet in air. Originally they were the washings of distant highlands brought down by rivers; the coloring of the shales and sandstones is that of the parent rock modified, no doubt, by chemical action in sea-water. The limestone, product of the sea, is gray.

As these differently colored strata were once continuous across the canyon, it follows that their sequence is practically identical on both sides of the canyon. That the colors seem confused is because, viewing the spectacle from an elevation, we see the enormous indentations of the opposite rim in broken and disorganized perspective. Few minds are patient and orderly enough to fully disentangle the kaleidoscopic disarray, but, if we can identify the strata by form as well as color, we can at least comprehend without trouble our principal outline; and comprehension is the broad highway to appreciation.

To identify these strata, it is necessary to call them by name. The names that geologists have assigned them have no scientific significance other than identity; they are Indian and local.

Beginning at the canyon rim we have a stalwart cliff of gray limestone known as the Kaibab Limestone, or, conversationally, the Kaibab; it is about seven hundred feet thick. Of this product of a million years of microscopic life and death on sea-bottoms is formed the splendid south-rim cliffs from which we view the chasm. Across the canyon it is always recognizable as the rim.

Below the talus of the Kaibab is the Coconino sandstone, light yellowish-gray, coarse of grain, the product of swift currents of untold thousands of centuries ago. This stratum makes a fine bright cliff usually about four hundred feet in thickness, an effective roofing for the glowing reds of the depths.

Immediately below the Coconino are the splendid red shales and sandstones known as the Supai formation. These lie in many strata of varying shades, qualities, and thicknesses, but all, seen across the canyon, merging into a single enormous horizontal body of gorgeous red. The Supai measures eleven hundred feet in perpendicular thickness, but as it is usually seen in slopes which sometimes are long and gentle, it presents to the eye a surface several times as broad. This is the most prominent single mass of color in the canyon, for not only does it form the broadest feature of the opposite wall and of the enormous promontories which jut therefrom, but the main bodies of Buddha, Zoroaster, and many others of the fantastic temples which rise from the floor.

Below the Supai, a perpendicular wall of intense red five hundred feet high forces its personality upon every foot of the canyon's vast length. This is the famous Redwall, a gray limestone stained crimson with the drip of Supai dye from above. Harder than the sloping sandstone above and the shale below, it pushes aggressively into the picture, squared, perpendicular, glowing. It winds in and out of every bay and gulf, and fronts precipitously every flaring promontory. It roofs with overhanging eaves many a noble palace and turns many a towering monument into a pagoda.

Next below in series is the Tonto, a deep, broad, shallow slant of dull-green and yellow shale, which, with the thin broad sandstone base on which it rests, forms the floor of the outer canyon, the tessellated pavement of the city of flame. Without the Tonto's green the spectacle of the Grand Canyon would have missed its contrast and its fulness.

Through this floor the Granite Gorge winds its serpentine way, two thousand feet deep, dark with shadows, shining in places where the river swings in view.