The Grand Canon of the Colorado by John Muir
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John Muir >> The Grand Canon of the Colorado
THE GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO
by John Muir
1902
Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth's wonders, new and old,
spread invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as
his slaves making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading
roads for him, boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, eager,
like the devil, to show him all the kingdoms of the world and their
glory and foolishness, spiritualizing travel for him with lightning
and steam, abolishing space and time and almost everything else.
Little children and tender, pulpy people, as well as storm-seasoned
explorers, may now go almost everywhere in smooth comfort, cross
oceans and deserts scarce accessible to fishes and birds, and,
dragged by steel horses, go up high mountains, riding gloriously
beneath starry showers of sparks, ascending like Elijah in a
whirlwind and chariot of fire.
First of the wonders of the great West to be brought within reach of
the tourist were the Yosemite and the Big Trees, on the completion
of the first transcontinental railway; next came the Yellowstone and
icy Alaska, by the Northern roads; and last the Grand Canon of the
Colorado, which, naturally the hardest to reach, has now become, by
a branch of the Santa Fe, the most accessible of all.
Of course with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our
wilderness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are
bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as
if stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads,
are frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish,
leaving nothing but ashes. Fortunately, nature has a few big places
beyond man's power to spoil--the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe,
and the Grand Canon.
When I first heard of the Santa Fe trains running to the edge of
the Grand Canon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the
disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when I saw those
trains crawling along through the pines of the Cocanini Forest and
close up to the brink of the chasm at Bright Angel, I was glad to
discover that in the presence of such stupendous scenery they are
nothing. The locomotives and trains are mere beetles and caterpillars,
and the noise they make is as little disturbing as the hooting of an
owl in the lonely woods.
In a dry, hot, monotonous forested plateau, seemingly boundless, you
come suddenly and without warning upon the abrupt edge of a gigantic
sunken landscape of the wildest, most multitudinous features, and
those features, sharp and angular, are made out of flat beds of
limestone and sandstone forming a spiry, jagged, gloriously colored
mountain-range countersunk in a level gray plain. It is a hard job
to sketch it even in scrawniest outline; and try as I may, not in
the least sparing myself, I cannot tell the hundredth part of the
wonders of its features--the side-canons, gorges, alcoves, cloisters,
and amphitheaters of vast sweep and depth, carved in its magnificent
walls; the throng of great architectural rocks it contains resembling
castles, cathedrals, temples, and palaces, towered and spired and
painted, some of them nearly a mile high, yet beneath one's feet.
All this, however, is less difficult than to give any idea of the
impression of wild, primeval beauty and power one receives in merely
gazing from its brink. The view down the gulf of color and over the
rim of its wonderful wall, more than any other view I know, leads us
to think of our earth as a star with stars swimming in light, every
radiant spire pointing the way to the heavens.
But it is impossible to conceive what the canon is, or what impression
it makes, from descriptions or pictures, however good. Naturally it is
untellable even to those who have seen something perhaps a little like
it on a small scale in this same plateau region. One's most extravagant
expectations are indefinitely surpassed, though one expect much from what
is said of it as "the biggest chasm on earth"--"so big is it that all
other big things,--Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids, Chicago,--all
would be lost if tumbled into it." Naturally enough, illustrations as to
size are sought for among other canons like or unlike it, with the common
result of worse confounding confusion. The prudent keep silence. It was
once said that the "Grand Canon could put a dozen Yosemites in its vest
pocket."
The justly famous Grand Canon of the Yellowstone is, like the Colorado,
gorgeously colored and abruptly countersunk in a plateau, and both are
mainly the work of water. But the Colorado's canon is more than a thousand
times larger, and as a score or two new buildings of ordinary size would
not appreciably change the general view of a great city, so hundreds of
Yellowstones might be eroded in the sides of the Colorado Canon without
noticeably augmenting its size or the richness of its sculpture. But it
is not true that the great Yosemite rocks would be thus lost or hidden.
Nothing of their kind in the world, so far as I know, rivals El Capitan
and Tissiack, much less dwarfs or in any way belittles them. None of the
sandstone or limestone precipices of the canon that I have seen or heard
of approaches in smooth, flawless strength and grandeur the granite face
of El Capitan or the Tenaya side of Cloud's Rest. These colossal cliffs,
types of permanence, are about three thousand and six thousand feet high;
those of the canon that are sheer are about half as high, and are types
of fleeting change; while glorious-domed Tissiack, noblest of mountain
buildings, far from being overshadowed or lost in this rosy, spiry canon
company, would draw every eye, and, in serene majesty, "aboon them a'" she
would take her place--castle, temple, palace, or tower. Nevertheless a
noted writer, comparing the Grand Canon in a general way with the glacial
Yosemite, says: "And the Yosemite--ah, the lovely Yosemite! Dumped down
into the wilderness of gorges and mountains, it would take a guide who
knew of its existence a long time to find it." This is striking, and shows
up well above the levels of commonplace description; but it is confusing,
and has the fatal fault of not being true. As well try to describe an eagle
by putting a lark in it. "And the lark--ah, the lovely lark! Dumped down
the red, royal gorge of the eagle, it would be hard to find." Each in its
own place is better, singing at heaven's gate, and sailing the sky with
the clouds.
Every feature of nature's big face is beautiful,--height and hollow,
wrinkle, furrow, and line,--and this is the main master furrow of its
kind on our continent, incomparably greater and more impressive than
any other yet discovered, or likely to be discovered, now that all the
great rivers have been traced to their heads.
The Colorado River rises in the heart of the continent on the dividing
ranges and ridges between the two oceans, drains thousands of snowy
mountains through narrow or spacious valleys, and thence through canons
of every color, sheer-walled and deep, all of which seem to be represented
in this one grand canon of canons.
It is very hard to give anything like an adequate conception of its size,
much more of its color, its vast wall-sculpture, the wealth of ornate
architectural buildings that fill it, or, most of all, the tremendous
impression it makes. According to Major Powell, it is about two hundred
and seventeen miles long, from five to fifteen miles wide from rim to rim,
and from about five thousand to six thousand feet deep. So tremendous a
chasm would be one of the world's greatest wonders even if, like ordinary
canons cut in sedimentary rocks, it were empty and its walls were simple.
But instead of being plain, the walls are so deeply and elaborately
carved into all sorts of recesses--alcoves, cirques, amphitheaters, and
side-canons--that were you to trace the rim closely around on both sides
your journey would be nearly a thousand miles long. Into all these
recesses the level, continuous beds of rock in ledges and benches, with
their various colors, run like broad ribbons, marvelously beautiful
and effective even at a distance of ten or twelve miles. And the vast
space these glorious walls inclose, instead of being empty, is crowded
with gigantic architectural rock forms gorgeously colored and adorned with
towers and spires like works of art.
Looking down from this level plateau, we are more impressed with a feeling
of being on the top of everything than when looking from the summit of a
mountain. From side to side of the vast gulf, temples, palaces, towers,
and spires come soaring up in thick array half a mile or nearly a mile
above their sunken, hidden bases, some to a level with our standpoint,
but none higher. And in the inspiring morning light all are so fresh and
rosy-looking that they seem new-born; as if, like the quick-growing crimson
snow-plants of the California woods, they had just sprung up, hatched by
the warm, brooding, motherly weather.
In trying to describe the great pines and sequoias of the Sierra, I have
often thought that if one of those trees could be set by itself in some
city park, its grandeur might there be impressively realized; while in its
home forests, where all magnitudes are great, the weary, satiated traveler
sees none of them truly. It is so with these majestic rock structures.
Though mere residual masses of the plateau, they are dowered with the
grandeur and repose of mountains, together with the finely chiseled
carving and modeling of man's temples and palaces, and often, to a
considerable extent, with their symmetry. Some, closely observed, look
like ruins; but even these stand plumb and true, and show architectural
forms loaded with lines strictly regular and decorative, and all are
arrayed in colors that storms and time seem only to brighten. They are not
placed in regular rows in line with the river, but "a' through ither,"
as the Scotch say, in lavish, exuberant crowds, as if nature in wildest
extravagance held her bravest structures as common as gravel-piles.
Yonder stands a spiry cathedral nearly five thousand feet in height,
nobly symmetrical, with sheer buttressed walls and arched doors and
windows, as richly finished and decorated with sculptures as the great
rock temples of India or Egypt. Beside it rises a huge castle with arched
gateway, turrets, watch-towers, ramparts, etc., and to right and left
palaces, obelisks, and pyramids fairly fill the gulf, all colossal and
all lavishly painted and carved. Here and there a flat-topped structure
may be seen, or one imperfectly domed; but the prevailing style is ornate
Gothic, with many hints of Egyptian and Indian.
Throughout this vast extent of wild architecture--nature's own capital
city--there seem to be no ordinary dwellings. All look like grand and
important public structures, except perhaps some of the lower pyramids,
broad-based and sharp-pointed, covered with down-flowing talus like
loosely set tents with hollow, sagging sides. The roofs often have
disintegrated rocks heaped and draggled over them, but in the main
the masonry is firm and laid in regular courses, as if done by square
and rule.
Nevertheless they are ever changing: their tops are now a dome, now a
flat table or a spire, as harder or softer strata are reached in their
slow degradation, while the sides, with all their fine moldings, are
being steadily undermined and eaten away. But no essential change in
style or color is thus effected. From century to century they stand the
same. What seems confusion among the rough earthquake-shaken crags nearest
one comes to order as soon as the main plan of the various structures
appears. Every building, however complicated and laden with ornamental
lines, is at one with itself and every one of its neighbors, for the
same characteristic controlling belts of color and solid strata extend
with wonderful constancy for very great distances, and pass through and
give style to thousands of separate structures, however their smaller
characters may vary.
Of all the various kinds of ornamental work displayed,--carving, tracery
on cliff-faces, moldings, arches, pinnacles,--none is more admirably
effective or charms more than the webs of rain-channeled taluses.
Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of waste or
excess, they cover roofs and dome-tops and the base of every cliff,
belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in beautiful
continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and out around
all the intricate system of side-canons, amphitheaters, cirques, and
scallops into which they are sculptured. From one point hundreds of miles
of this fairy embroidery may be traced. It is all so fine and orderly
that it would seem that not only had the clouds and streams been kept
harmoniously busy in the making of it, but that every raindrop sent like
a bullet to a mark had been the subject of a separate thought, so sure is
the outcome of beauty through the stormy centuries. Surely nowhere else
are there illustrations so striking of the natural beauty of desolation
and death, so many of nature's own mountain buildings wasting in glory of
high desert air--going to dust. See how steadfast in beauty they all are
in their going. Look again and again how the rough, dusty boulders and
sand of disintegration from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty the next
and next below with these wonderful taluses, and how the colors are finer
the faster the waste. We oftentimes see nature giving beauty for ashes,--as
in the flowers of a prairie after fire,--but here the very dust and ashes
are beautiful.
Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once unbroken
plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge beds of rocks.
Other valleys of erosion are as great,--in all their dimensions some
are greater,--but none of these produces an effect on the imagination
at once so quick and profound, coming without study, given at a glance.
Therefore by far the greatest and most influential feature of this view
from Bright Angel or any other of the canon views is the opposite wall.
Of the one beneath our feet we see only fragmentary sections in cirques
and amphitheaters and on the sides of the outjutting promontories between
them, while the other, though far distant, is beheld in all its glory of
color and noble proportions--the one supreme beauty and wonder to which the
eye is ever turning. For while charming with its beauty it tells the story
of the stupendous erosion of the canon--the foundation of the unspeakable
impression made on everybody. It seems a gigantic statement for even nature
to make, all in one mighty stone word, apprehended at once like a burst of
light, celestial color its natural vesture, coming in glory to mind and
heart as to a home prepared for it from the very beginning. Wildness so
godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth's beauty and size.
Not even from high mountains does the world seem so wide, so like a star
in glory of light on its way through the heavens.
I have observed scenery-hunters of all sorts getting first views of
yosemites, glaciers. While Mountain ranges, etc. Mixed with the enthusiasm
which such scenery naturally excites, there is often weak gushing, and
many splutter aloud like little waterfalls. Here, for a few moments at
least, there is silence, and all are in dead earnest, as if awed and
hushed by an earthquake--perhaps until the cook cries "Breakfast!" or
the stable-boy "Horses are ready!" Then the poor unfortunates, slaves of
regular habits, turn quickly away, gasping and muttering as if wondering
where they had been and what had enchanted them.
Roads have been made from Bright Angel Hotel through the Cocanini Forest
to the ends of outstanding promontories, commanding extensive views up
and down the canon. The nearest of them, three or four miles east and
west, are McNeil's Point and Rowe's Point; the latter, besides commanding
the eternally interesting canon, gives wide-sweeping views southeast and
west over the dark forest roof to the San Francisco and Mount Trumbull
volcanoes--the bluest of mountains over the blackest of level woods.
Instead of thus riding in dust with the crowd, more will be gained by
going quietly afoot along the rim at different times of day and night,
free to observe the vegetation, the fossils in the rocks, the seams
beneath overhanging ledges once inhabited by Indians, and to watch the
stupendous scenery in the changing lights and shadows, clouds, showers,
and storms. One need not go hunting the so-called "points of interest."
The verge anywhere, everywhere, is a point of interest beyond one's
wildest dreams.
As yet, few of the promontories or throng of mountain buildings in the
canon are named. Nor among such exuberance of forms are names thought
of by the bewildered, hurried tourist. He would be as likely to think of
names for waves in a storm. The Eastern and Western Cloisters, Hindu
Amphitheater, Cape Royal, Powell's Plateau, and Grand View Point, Point
Sublime, Bissell and Moran points, the Temple of Set, Vishnu's Temple,
Shiva's Temple, Twin Temples, Tower of Babel, Hance's Column--these fairly
good names given by Dutton, Holmes, Moran, and others are scattered over
a large stretch of the canon wilderness.
All the canon rock-beds are lavishly painted, except a few neutral bars
and the granite notch at the bottom occupied by the river, which makes
but little sign. It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of light,
colored and glowing like oak and maple woods in autumn, when the sun-gold
is richest. I have just said that it is impossible to learn what the
canon is like from descriptions and pictures. Powell's and Dutton's
descriptions present magnificent views not only of the canon but of all
the grand region round about it; and Holmes's drawings, accompanying
Dutton's report, are wonderfully good. Surely faithful and loving skill
can go no further in putting the multitudinous decorated forms on paper.
But the _colors_, the living, rejoicing _colors_, chanting morning and
evening in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or pencil, however lovingly
inspired, can give us these? And if paint is of no effect, what hope
lies in pen-work? Only this: some may be incited by it to go and see
for themselves.
No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same extent
have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored. The famous
Yellowstone Canon below the falls comes to mind, but, wonderful as it
is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with this it is only a
bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines. Each of the series of
level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of the canon has, as we
have seen, its own characteristic color. The summit limestone-beds are
pale yellow; next below these are the beautiful rose-colored cross-bedded
sandstones; next there are a thousand feet of brilliant red sandstones;
and below these the red wall limestones, over two thousand feet thick,
rich massy red, the greatest and most influential of the series, and
forming the main color-fountain. Between these are many neutral-tinted
beds. The prevailing colors are wonderfully deep and clear, changing and
blending with varying intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season to
season; throbbing, wavering, glowing, responding to every passing cloud
or storm, a world of color in itself, now burning in separate rainbow bars
streaked and blotched with shade, now glowing in one smooth, all-pervading
ethereal radiance like the alpenglow, uniting the rocky world with the
heavens.
The dawn, as in all the pure, dry desert country, is ineffably beautiful;
and when the first level sunbeams sting the domes and spires, with what a
burst of power the big, wild days begin! The dead and the living, rocks
and hearts alike, awake and sing the new-old song of creation. All the
massy headlands and salient angles of the walls, and the multitudinous
temples and palaces, seem to catch the light at once, and cast thick black
shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing out details as well as the main
massive features of the architecture; while all the rocks, as if wild with
life, throb and quiver and glow in the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every
rock temple then becomes a temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an
angel of light and song, shouting color halleluiahs.
As the day draws to a close, shadows, wondrous, black, and thick, like
those of the morning, fill up the wall hollows, while the glowing rocks,
their rough angles burned off, seem soft and hot to the heart as they
stand submerged in purple haze, which now fills the canon like a sea.
Still deeper, richer, more divine grow the great walls and temples, until
in the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole canon is transfigured,
as if all the life and light of centuries of sunshine stored up and
condensed in the rocks was now being poured forth as from one glorious
fountain, flooding both earth and sky.
Strange to say, in the full white effulgence of the midday hours the bright
colors grow dim and terrestrial in common gray haze; and the rocks, after
the manner of mountains, seem to crouch and drowse and shrink to less than
half their real stature, and have nothing to say to one, as if not at home.
But it is fine to see how quickly they come to life and grow radiant and
communicative as soon as a band of white clouds come floating by. As if
shouting for joy, they seem to spring up to meet them in hearty salutation,
eager to touch them and beg their blessings. It is just in the midst of
these dull midday hours that the canon clouds are born.
A good storm-cloud full of lightning and rain on its way to its work on
a sunny desert day is a glorious object. Across the canon, opposite the
hotel, is a little tributary of the Colorado called Bright Angel Creek.
A fountain-cloud still better deserves the name "Angel of the Desert
Wells"--clad in bright plumage, carrying cool shade and living water to
countless animals and plants ready to perish, noble in form and gesture,
seeming able for anything, pouring life-giving, wonder-working floods from
its alabaster fountains, as if some sky-lake had broken. To every gulch
and gorge on its favorite ground is given a passionate torrent, roaring,
replying to the rejoicing lightning--stones, tons in weight, hurrying away
as if frightened, showing something of the way Grand Canon work is done.
Most of the fertile summer clouds of the canon are of this sort, massive,
swelling cumuli, growing rapidly, displaying delicious tones of purple and
gray in the hollows of their sun-beaten bosses, showering favored areas
of the heated landscape, and vanishing in an hour or two. Some, busy and
thoughtful-looking, glide with beautiful motion along the middle of the
canon in flocks, turning aside here and there, lingering as if studying
the needs of particular spots, exploring side-canons, peering into hollows
like birds seeking nest-places, or hovering aloft on outspread wings. They
scan all the red wilderness, dispensing their blessings of cool shadows
and rain where the need is the greatest, refreshing the rocks, their
offspring as well as the vegetation, continuing their sculpture, deepening
gorges and sharpening peaks. Sometimes, blending all together, they weave
a ceiling from rim to rim, perhaps opening a window here and there for
sunshine to stream through, suddenly lighting some palace or temple and
making it flare in the rain as if on fire.
Sometimes, as one sits gazing from a high, jutting promontory, the sky
all clear, showing not the slightest wisp or penciling, a bright band of
cumuli will appear suddenly, coming up the canon in single file, as if
tracing a well-known trail, passing in review, each in turn darting its
lances and dropping its shower, making a row of little vertical rivers
in the air above the big brown one. Others seem to grow from mere points,
and fly high above the canon, yet following its course for a long time,
noiseless, as if hunting, then suddenly darting lightning at unseen marks,
and hurrying on. Or they loiter here and there as if idle, like laborers
out of work, waiting to be hired.
Half a dozen or more showers may oftentimes be seen falling at once, while
far the greater part of the sky is in sunshine, and not a raindrop comes
nigh one. These thunder-showers from as many separate clouds, looking like
wisps of long hair, may vary greatly in effects. The pale, faint streaks
are showers that fail to reach the ground, being evaporated on the way down
through the dry, thirsty air, like streams in deserts. Many, on the other
hand, which in the distance seem insignificant, are really heavy rain,
however local; these are the gray wisps well zigzagged with lightning. The
darker ones are torrent rain, which on broad, steep slopes of favorable
conformation give rise to so-called "cloudbursts"; and wonderful is the
commotion they cause. The gorges and gulches below them, usually dry,
break out in loud uproar, with a sudden downrush of muddy, boulder-laden
floods. Down they all go in one simultaneous gush, roaring like lions
rudely awakened, each of the tawny brood actually kicking up a dust at
the first onset.