Editor’s Note: This essay is the first contribution to Arizona Highways by Tom Zoellner, whom The New York Times calls “a beautiful writer, a superb reporter and a deep thinker.” It’s adapted from his new book Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona (University of Arizona Press, 2023). We’re excited to share his writing with you.
Has anybody truly seen the Grand Canyon? The first view into the gorge assaults the eye with detail and color, overwhelming the mind’s capacity to focus on any one point in the mess of ruined sheet cake: a geological supernova quilled with soaring pillars, rounded temples, fallen battlements, gigantic toadstools and high walls lacquered in colors of apricot, lava, bisque, mulberry and umber. The canvas is so orchestral the viewer almost expects to hear urgent cymbals, bellowing woodwinds and shouting arias from a Wagnerian end of the world. But the Canyon keeps a terrible silence.
And there it goes again: yet another printed attempt to translate the inexpressible sight of the Grand Canyon into the sanity of language. These descriptions are always hopeless. The ambition to match this sublime landscape with a squirting of ink symbols is like trying to throw a paper airplane into the sun. But the struggles keep coming every day via articles, instant messages, letters and emails, trying to render in words what amazing horror lies out there in the gash.
“When a writer has tackled everything in the line of fancy descriptive writing, he crowns his life work with a pen picture of the Grand Canyon,” John McCutcheon observed in Appleton’s Magazine in 1909, just as the first railroad access brought in a flood of visitors and would-be poets.
No photo or painting has captured it, either, although there have been billions. None ever could. The Canyon will always withhold the largest parts of itself, concealing its many worlds behind stone curtains no matter where the viewer stands. This knowledge makes any view of the Canyon all the more graphic, almost profane, certainly alienating, the apotheosis of what John Keats said about “negative capability” — the power of totally ungraspable beauty. Comparing it to any other fissure is like what is said about the difference between seeing a partial and a total solar eclipse. One is like a kiss; the other is like lovemaking.
But this is just the visual problem. Now combine it with the intellectual blast of understanding of how this graveyard terrain formed when the Colorado River responded to the gravitational pull of the sea by shredding new channels through a plateau of loess and hardened magma, opening the deep-time sandwich of 15 geological eras layered on one another and, beneath that, some of the oldest stone on the planet. The Vishnu Basement Rocks are 1.7 billion years old, making the Colorado River an interloping youngster.
And you there, standing on the edge? Pfft! A blip. The sigh of a dying mouse. A sprinkle of dust.
Visitors who wrote of their first look often described a profound sensual shock. Some were prone to enthuse over the handiwork of the creator, but some, especially pastors, came away almost trembling, their faith in a benevolent God challenged after gazing on the hellish wreckage of his sweet creation. Could humanity be the only consciousness in the universe?
Many early visitors tried for a written description before retreating to the sensible position of total futility. “One’s powers of articulation are paralyzed,” J.C. Martin wrote in an 1894 edition of Prescott’s Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner. “The artist stands aghast as he gazes on its cliffs and pinnacles, colored with a wealth of coloring, the secret of whose blending is known only to the infinite.”
He spoke for multitudes of the awestruck. The Canyon is only an extension of one of the oldest ontological questions that most people confront at some point: How can we understand anything at all? A view of the Canyon puts that matter directly in front of the visitor like a sledgehammer to the face: the question of ultimate reality usually shelved away into the far corners of conscious thought.
Against our will, the Canyon exposes the rift between the world as it is, in all its terrible majesty, and the tiny world we experience in our heads, cloistered in our insect perceptions and equipped with feeble eyes that can barely see 10 miles to the horizon, let alone give us a glimpse of the true existence we choicelessly inhabit. A canyon, indeed.
Can we touch or even approach that larger reality that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Being? In one of his more lucid passages, the famously difficult thinker wrote of walking up to a “well-shaped apple tree” growing by itself in a field. “This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of these ‘ideas’ buzzing about in our heads,” he wrote.
The tree, of course, has an independent existence. But we can never touch it — not really. Our neurology only wraps the latex glove of the five senses around the tree. We can look at it until our eyes burn, sniff its trunk, put its leaves in our mouth, run our palms over the bark until they bleed, and all of those experiences are still filtered through sense perceptions and not truly direct. The core always dances outside our grasp. We do not know Being, only the signposts that point toward it over the horizon. The tree — and the Grand Canyon — might as well be a hologram.
The same is true for the written word. You could build your house next to that apple tree, orient the study window toward it, open the blinds, contemplate it for hours each day and write 5 million words dedicated to the tree. None of your encyclopedia would ever come close to the heart of that tree. Language can whiz around pure Being like a swarm of electrons, but it can never pierce the nucleus. And so strange that the language used to describe hard truth often reaches for geological terms to describe the end of frivolous speculation and the beginning of the unchangeable. Bedrock principles. Cornerstone. Foundational. Stone-cold truth. Ironclad. Rock solid. The crumbled necropolis of the Canyon puts the lie to that idea.
In a related thought no less startling, the British physicist Roger Penrose has pointed out that three basic realities exist simultaneously: strict Euclidean mathematics, the physical world of objects and the realm of consciousness. These three hard realms inform each other but do not touch. The geometric ratios of the apple tree are not the same as the wood of the apple tree, which are also not your own visual perceptions and thoughts about the tree.
Immanuel Kant made a similar observation in Critique of Pure Reason. Standing between you and ultimate reality is a 2-pound mass of wet processing equipment called the brain. We can watch the show from a distant edge. But we will never get close, never truly touch.
This is why all those failed literary attempts to describe the Grand Canyon bring us close to the mystery of existence.
We lack a precise linguistic record of what the first human residents of the Canyon thought of their surroundings, although the rock art of the Western Archaic culture of 4,000 years ago offers some clues.
A panel of ochre marks on the sandstone — some of the oldest “writing” in civilization — shows elongated human figures against a backdrop of zigzagging lines that may represent mountains, and beaded circles that may represent caves, or motherhood, or the Canyon itself. The birth imagery, suggestive of a larger emergence, indicates these pioneer citizens may have seen the Canyon as a source of their being.
The first Europeans who happened on it lacked any coherent grammar to describe what they’d seen. García López de Cárdenas sent some men down the Canyon in 1540 to see about a Colorado River crossing, but it took them three days to make it even a third of the way down. They gave up, cursing their Hopi guides, who were almost certainly trying to mislead them. When they returned to camp, they told stories of boulders “taller than the great tower of Seville.” Cárdenas himself viewed the magnificent split in the earth as nothing more than a tactical obstacle between him and rumored cities of gold.
Americans who arrived later also could not seem to process it in aesthetic terms, as if it was painted in a color not visible to the human eye. Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives explored the Canyon 317 years after Cárdenas and found it curious, but not worthy of sustained attention. “The region is, of course, altogether valueless,” he wrote in his withering Report on the Colorado River of the West in 1864. “It can be approached only from the south, and after entering there is nothing to do but leave.”
Ives’ bleak assessment came in for radical revision by John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran who had lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh. In 1869, he marshaled up supplies and took the railroad out to Green River, Wyoming, where he and 10 companions set out to float down the Colorado and report their findings. This epic journey, and another in the winter two years later, resulted in a celebrated report on what had previously been a flumen incognita.
What many forget about Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons was how light it was on geography and how lavish in descriptive prose that tried — as many would after him — to sum up the impossible. Powell made a ritual confession of literary inadequacy before launching into intricate sentences such as this:
When thinking of these rocks one must not conceive of piles of boulders or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored — buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate — never lichened, never moss-covered, but bare, and often polished.
His friend Clarence Dutton upped the literary ante even higher with a tour de force entitled Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, written for the U.S. Geological Survey after he spent months camped on the South Rim and studying the glorious disaster beneath him.
Although cheerfully agnostic, Dutton was a student of world religions and had an awareness that such an apparition should reach for otherworldly labeling. He bestowed exotic names on the metropolis of buttes and mesas: Vishnu Temple, Zoroaster Temple, Rama Shrine. Other figures from world religions received their due: Solomon, Apollo, Venus, Thor, Horus, Buddha, Krishna, Confucius. This seeming horror of the cosmos in Arizona was, in fact, “the most sublime and awe-inspiring spectacle in the world,” disclosed late in history to the Western mind. And to glimpse it was to surrender to profound confusion.
“The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, in Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado,” Dutton cautioned, “would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror.”
The Grand Canyon was no terrestrial atrocity, Dutton said, but instead a jewel of creation that deserved a radical new method of appreciation. The history of Western art would have turned out different if the Canyon had been plopped on the plains of central Europe, he said, just as the imposing cone of Mount Fuji had influenced Japanese painting. The ugly gash of the Canyon must be studied with patience, he argued, before “the forms which seemed grotesque” could be revealed in dignity and grace. No fast views would ever suffice.
The Tertiary History was a masterpiece of geological specificity contained within richly descriptive prose, and it was one of the finest government documents ever written. The public loved the report; it became a huge hit and opened the Canyon for the type of mass appreciation Dutton suggested. A platoon of entrepreneurs then did their best to shrink the Canyon down to human scale, to package and present it to visitors. In short, to sell it. This new frame of reality would put a cash register in the foreground of Vishnu’s splendors.
One of the great capitalist rogues of Arizona, Ralph Cameron, tried to claim the entire Canyon as his personal property. He came out from Maine in 1883, took an interest in the Canyon and dug a copper mine near Grandview Point that turned him and his brother, in the eyes of a friend, into “ragged-assed millionaires.” But he realized more profit could be wrung from the tourists drifting to the area in stagecoaches. “I have always said that I would make more money out of the Grand Canyon than any other man,” he remarked.
This took a little construction work. Havasupai sheepherders on the river had found a sloping fissure on the South Rim to drive their flocks up to summer pasture. Using frivolous mining claims to secure the old, corkscrewing route, Cameron hired a crew to shovel and blast a wider lane and named it the Bright Angel Trail, charging visitors $1 to descend. On what then was called Indian Garden, a watered glade near the halfway point, he erected a few primitive shacks and called them a hotel. Mule train guides hit their passengers with a surprise here: It would cost them another dollar to be taken back. And an additional charge to use the outhouse.
A threat to Cameron’s monopoly arrived in 1901, when the tracks of a spur line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived at the South Rim, along with a corporate vision of a luxury vacation haven for aesthetes and outdoorsmen. The railroad had seen pikers like Cameron before, but he promoted himself to the public as the little guy battling the real monopoly. “He could charm a bird out of a tree,” a federal official observed. And he used more bogus mining claims to pin down strategic points in the Canyon where he was betting a hydroelectric dam might one day be erected.
To the deep-pocketed Santa Fe and its allies in Washington, Cameron was a parasitical huckster trying to turn the Canyon into a third-rate tourist trap. They sought to drive him out by erecting a resort of limestone and pine logs — a blown-up version of a hunting cabin — called El Tovar, for one of the lieutenants on the 1540 Spanish expedition. Federal judges kept ruling against Cameron, but he refused to leave.
The railroad gave up and bought his dumpy hotel for a sum it refused to disclose but that was almost certainly exorbitant. And then President Woodrow Wilson, not ordinarily a friend of conservationists, was persuaded to sign a bill creating Grand Canyon National Park in 1919. Administrators then ordered Cameron to cart all the “filth and refuse” out of what now is known as Havasupai Gardens, replacing the typhoid-ridden accommodations with a set of stone bungalows called Phantom Ranch down at the river.
Cameron got revenge, of a sort, by getting himself elected as a U.S. senator from Arizona on a populist platform in 1920 and trying to withdraw appropriations for the park. But even as he maneuvered, the park was already being transformed by the vision of a onetime reporter for the New York Sun who, like Cameron, had a flair for promotion. Stephen T. Mather had made his fortune from helping advertise the 20 Mule Team brand of borax powder. But he struggled with depression. Only walks in the woods, it seemed, cheered his spirit.
Mather accepted an offer to become the first director of the National Park Service in 1917 and set about democratizing the face of America’s prettiest places, wanting everyone to see what he saw, selling the view like soap. Paved roads were the key to mass enjoyment, Mather believed, and he replaced old wagon paths with asphalt, centering them on visitors centers, scenic drives and concession stands. The customer base shifted from artists and hunters toward families in their cars and campers — the basic shape of the park as it is today. When you take a map at the entry booth of a national park, you’re looking at Mather’s vision.
“Leave it as it is,” President Theodore Roosevelt had said at the Grand Canyon on May 6, 1903. “The ages have been at work on it, and you can only mar it.” Conservators of the park have stayed mainly true to that idea. Mather’s roads have a limited footprint on the North and South Rims. Harebrained schemes, such as the 2017 proposal to build an aerial tramway to the bottom, have been stopped in their tracks. Bids to extend uranium mining near the Canyon have been rebuffed by Washington authorities in the name of protecting the watershed from radioactive debris.
One of the monuments on the South Rim is a Park Service installation called the Trail of Time, which details the geological formation of the Canyon in a series of interpretive markers, starting 2 billion years ago and ending at the present. Each meter walked stands for a million years — as good a futile representation as any piece of flowery writing.
Perhaps the uncomfortable questions that hover over the abyss are what inspire so many people to rebel against the physical reality of the Canyon — to attempt to defeat it with their own strength. The “rim to rim to rim” journey is a brass ring among ultramarathoners, a 42-mile ordeal that takes about eight hours for an Olympic-level athlete to complete. Others punish themselves in the tradition of the late Harvey Butchart, a math professor from Northern Arizona University who scaled the cliffs here in 164 known spots. But even the most intense physicality brings the visitor no closer to the heart of the matter. All the views are valid, and none of them is complete.
The Grand Canyon is at the edge of perception, where certainties drop out of sight and we enter territory where even the strictest atheists must confess some simulacrum of religion, if only that of simple wonderment — the only place to retreat after all language collapses and all the achievements of science still leave us with a void of meaning. We’ll never really get it.
Perhaps this is why a retreat into El Tovar to sit by the fireplace in the dark-logged lobby is such a relief. These are human dimensions that we can understand. We can think about dinner, or how to load the car the next morning, or what’s brewing back at the office. The drama of 2 billion years lies sprawled naked out there, but we must make peace somehow with the single day that we are allotted. Easier not to think of it much.
Perhaps it is merciful that we cannot really see the Grand Canyon. It is Arizona’s most famous signpost into the unspeakable, the death of rationality, which is really just an unwelcome challenge to our tiny human view — the drunkenness of ordinary life jolted for a brief moment into awestruck sobriety.
A view of the Grand Canyon goes in more than out.