The Grand Canyon: The Yin and the Yang of The American West

All blogs have been past due this year. It's no one's fault but my own. I seem to find little time just to chill and write anymore, much to my heart's discontent and desperation. But delay no longer …

We returned to the Southwestern desert about a month ago. Lucky as I have always been, I have reasons to go back for work, and because work would be no fun without play, I plan to see a lot more of the desert when I embark on these mandatory trips. Although I love the trees of North Carolina, the rivers, lakes, and ocean, too, my soul craves the desert every so often. Just like you crave a sunburn in the dead of winter.

We drove down from Utah into Arizona, to see The Grand Canyon for the first time together. We made Page, AZ our base-camp, and we traveled from there to The South Rim the first day and to the North Rim the second day.

I have said this before numberless times: anyone should experience driving through the desert at least once in their lifetime. The open space, the desolation, the solitary confinement between you and God, the hopelessness of hitting nothing but red and dust and rock and short and spikey prairie grasses does things to your brain and your heart that you can only feel; I cannot put into words well enough to tell you what that feeling is like. Not to mention that it is probably different for each one of us. One thing that I know for sure is that the desert will never leave you untouched, unstirred to your core, and unmoved... It's one of those experiences that I guarantee will change your life, or at the very least your perspective.

Every time when I drive through the desert and I take it in through my eyes, and nostrils, and ears, my mind brims with its vastness and never-endingness. There is some similarity, in my head, between the vastness of the ocean and that of the desert. No wonder that they tell us that the desert was once an ocean … I don't find that impossible one bit.

Page is a little bedroom community, it seems, for folks vising the Lake Powell and Glen Canyon areas, or The Grand Canyon. I know one person who grew up there, but even he says “it was only temporary.” This is the land of The Southwest, where adobe houses and Mexican food are good friends, where Navajo Indians hail from, and where peachy-pink sunsets are born. If you're quiet enough, you can hear the many centuries of history this land endured, from the territorial wars with Mexico, to those of The White Men submitting The Indians. The thousand years of traditions that the Colorado washed by, most of them unknown and undocumented, but only undug and guessed at by curious, lonely, university savants.

As many millions or billions of people in the world, I had seen The Grand Canyon in many pictures, magazines, movies, commercials and the like. I had some idea of what it would look like. But of course being on the edge of this big gaping hole, seen even from Space, is different than looking at a postcard. The one thing that shocked me was the incredible difference between the South and the North Rims. They are truly as different as the Yin and the Yang of a Chinese symbol.

Grand Canyon -  South Rim 

The South Rim is what we saw first. This is the Yang, full of light, screaming bright red and orange hues, and flooded in sunlight. This is the poster child of Arizona, as we all imagine it. It was also the most crowded and busiest. As gorgeous as the landscape was, I would not be fair to not tell you, it was also the most touristy and somewhat cheesiest. If you looked past the human factor, it was as saintly and majestic of a cathedral as all the other God given beauties of the world!

Grand Canyon -  South Rim 

Our world got darker the second day, and not just because it started raining pretty much as you left our hotel in Page. Driving to the North Rim was incredibly similar to driving towards Yellowstone National Park or maybe Glacier National in Montana. We could tell we were much higher than when we were at the top of the South Rim, the day before: the pine forests and the ashes never seem to grow lavishly and freely under 8000 or so feet. Once we stopped at the Visitors' Center for the North Rim, it all seemed dead. Deserted and locked away for the winter. No facilities were open, and the handful of visitors were pretty quiet and reserved. Not the cackling crowd of the day before, on the Yang Rim. It was also cold. Bitter windy and cold.

Grand Canyon -  North Rim at Bright Angel Point

You cannot park right next to the rim in The North, like we could the day before. After you park you have to hike a ways through the parking lot, and then through trails to actually arrive at the end of Bright Angel Point and see the canyon below. The canyon walls here are closer to each other, and much, much darker: the landscape turns from the brilliant red and orange into dark greens and blacks in The North. It is as if you are not even looking at the same formation anymore. The Colorado is down there, you think, for you cannot see it, and the terraces slope down towards it, just like you would expect. Yet, the closeness of the two cliffs and the dark colors make you wonder if you are standing at the top of the Going to the Sun road in Glacier National, or truly at the top of The Grand Canyon.

On the North Rim you are in the midst of the Yin of The American Grand Canyon: dark, secretive, hidden, obscure and remote. If you ever saw The North Rim out of the context of its state, and were asked to place it in any American State, Arizona would never come to mind. There was a bluish – grayish haze in the air, maybe the earlier rain that day, or maybe the cold breath of the canyon vegetation. Who knows?! If the South Rim looked like a Florida naked body, scorched in the sun and ready for the next fruity drink, the North looked like an old, grumpy bear, heavy and dark, wanting to be left alone, back turned towards the world while entering its caverns.

There was a strange mystery about The North Rim, a secrecy that one could not decipher. There was an eerie silence and no sound except the breeze through the trees around us echoing into the deep, dark valley below. You could stand unmoved and think the world is dead around you. And then, a baby snake crossed our path reminding us the world is still very much alive, yet.

One thing you cannot help but wonder about when you oversee such ancient, wild, and untouched beauty is the passing of time. I always wonder what such land looked like millions of years ago – I am sure it was different, but I am also sure it was just as gorgeous as it is today. What I hope for the world is that we are smart enough to keep this incomparable beauty untouched, keep its secrets hidden, its trails crooked and trees afresh for the millions of people that will come after us.

What I felt at the top of this huge gap was lucky: to be alive, to be able to move and get there, to be able to see, and smell, and taste the cold, dry air of the desert. I also felt grateful and moved that I am equipped with the right emotional package to understand the depth of the world in front of me, literal, or otherwise.

I could write volumes about how I felt and what I saw and not a word of it would help you understand the same that I understood when I was there. All I can advise you to do is make time from your busy life and go experience it: drive through the desert, search for the spots the most hidden and let your heart listen; let your eye watch. And come back transformed.

My sister and I have talked for years about how we must go away for a while, periodically, remove ourselves from our routines and recharge our batteries. If we don't do this a couple of times a year, just go, hide, and listen to the wind in the trees or a river, or the sound of the ocean waves, or the sound of deep, unshattered silence under the starry skies, whatever … we would never be able to get out of bed and do our daily routines ever again. We would never be able to face this crazy world with all the bad, disappointing news in it. This was one of those purging trips! Recharged and life counter is now back to 0.

I will close with some wiser and more talented words than mine, just to give you a better description than I could put together of this wide-open, universe-famous, all American gem:

“It seems like a gigantic statement for even Nature to make all in one mighty stone word. Wildness so Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth's beauty and size. . . . 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? In the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole canyon is transfigured, as if the life and light of centuries of sunshine stored up in the rocks was now being poured forth as from one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and Sky." (John Muir)

Grand Canyon -  North Rim
Click the picture to view the entire album from this trip