Grand Canyon
Posted By Sika on May 12, 2007
When we arrived at Grand Canyon, we stopped just inside to eat the lunch we picked up for a picnic and stopped at Desert View to start looking around and eat. Lizi was freezing and had two fleeces, a jacket, and her gloves on because of the freezing 60 some odd degree weather.
Lizi laughed at me because I got distracted by the rawhide wrapped banisters (She said to me, about the photos I took, “I can’t even tell what those are.)
When we finally got to the hotel, we waited in line to check in and noticed that the intryweb was $15/hr. Lizi and I wandered off (after obligatory naptime) for the sunset and then for a Ranger talk at the Shrine of Ages about how the Grand Canyon came to be. The ranger liked the word piffle a lot, which I enjoyed. He talked about how the area around the Grand Canyon was raised “mysteriously high and flat” and then became the canyon because the “rain bombs” have no choice but to follow gravity down, down, down, through the rocks. In most areas the ground has been raised up by subluxation (at least that’s the medical term; I don’t remember if it’s also the geological term.) and so the strata become vertical, allowing many many points of weakness for the water to travel through without eroding the earth too much. But if the earth is like a bunch of plates stacked on top of one another, the water has to burrow through all those layers. My favorite part, though, was when he was talking about how the Grand Canyon is the Grand Canyon because we have food and shelter. He said that anyone who doubted it should go out to the rim at night, without food or water or clothes or any kind of protection and then see how Grand they felt the canyon was in the morning
after on overexposed night. I like the idea, that it is an amazing place because that’s how we choose to see it.
One of the things that bothered me was this posted scripture I found in various places in the park. The first one we saw was this psalm about wonder that you can’t quite comprehend, and that was totally fine. But on another Mary Colter building there was one quote from scripture about the Lord our God or whatever, and that was more upsetting to me. I get that sometimes people turn to religion to help them to be able to absorb the vastness and the wonder of the world, but the Grand Canyon is not Christian, and so it seems kind of ridiculous to try to claim it as such. Also, I remembered a big to-do recently when a religious right group, with the help of yet more unqualified Bush appointees, managed to get a book on the true, intelligent-design nature of the Grand Canyon into the natural history section of the Grand Canyon bookstores. Which is kind of frustrating when you want to be soaking in the wonder of what the Grand Canyon is and other people, with the help of the government, are trying to push their Noah’s Ark theories as the true story.
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