What's Your Colorado River?

Cross-Country Trip, Day 3 morning

Still at the Grand Canyon

Unless you're an amateur scientist, it's hard to understand the intricacies of how the Grand Canyon was created.  We sat through two presentations and read every plaque in the Yavapai Geology Museum, and I still can't quite figure it out.  But what I did take away was this:    

The Grand Canyon was once the Colorado Plateau, a flat expanse of land with a river coursing through it.  Over hundreds of millions of years, snowmelt, runoff, sediment, gravity, and the forces of physics all had a hand in shaping the land, eroding it downward and exposing the layers of rock we see now.   Without the Colorado River, there would be no Grand Canyon.  The River shaped the Canyon, literally creating it when rapids and sediment (including truck-sized boulders) came pounding down from higher elevations and slammed and ground into existing rock.  Eventually, the rock gave way.  Which got me thinking:  We all start out as flat as the original plateau, with our own individual versions of a Colorado River running right through the middle of us, and bringing with it the irresistible forces that come tumbling through and shape us, creating crevices and tributaries, and eroding parts of us that we once thought were true and hard as rock, forming a new landscape.   Too much?  OK, let me get back to the travelogue.    

The Canyon walls are mesmerizing.  The deep rich colors, the way layers of rock seem to flow down like melted chocolate, the sheer scale of it. 

Space flattens distance, says the plaque in the Geology Museum, but you can't understand what that means until you stand at the south rim and look north.  The north rim is over 9 miles away yet it seems, if not close enough to touch, not very far either.  If you hovered in a helicopter over the middle of the canyon, level with the rim, and dropped your sunglasses, they would fall more than a mile down, but again, it seems a lot closer.   Our eyes deceive us, and maybe that's a survival mechanism because if we knew how far we had to go, we'd never start the journey.  

The strange thing about the Canyon is that its most influential cause is barely visible.  From the rim, the Colorado River can only be seen in tiny little patches more than a mile below.  But videos of white-water rafting in the visitors' center left us with visions of our return trip.  Next time, we're going to see the Canyon from the bottom up.  

Pine Forest Below the Rim