Dawn.
Though not yet seen, its presence is felt in the bones.
The stillness is palpable, like the moment when an orchestra's conductor raises his
baton.
Finally, a faint glow warms the eastern horizon, and a soft light flows into a great void.
The overture has begun, and the canyon awakens.
Hidden deep within the layered rock is the trembling music of rushing water, the tripping
notes of a canyon wren, the soft buzz of a cicada, or is it the warning of a rattlesnake?
The composer of this symphony has spent millennia arranging the score, balancing the cadence,
and adjusting the tempo.
Yet, this opus in stone and light is still not finished.
The composition is ever-evolving.
The movements can be as sweet as the song of the wind through the pines and cedars,
or as discordant as the raven's croak, as rough as the ridge of weathered limestone,
or as smooth as water-polished granite.
The day ends with the crescendo of a fiery sunset, but the melody lingers into the velvet
night in the song of crickets and the call of a poor will floating on the air.
Through the night, I'm чего
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River slices across in
northern Arizona like a deep wound in the Earth's crust.
It may not be the world's deepest canyon, nor its longest, but it blends together a
breathtaking assortment of brightly-hued cliffs, buttes, temples, and terraces that defy superlatives,
challenging wordsmiths and artists alike.
The canyon is awesome in the fullest sense of the word.
Who first saw the Grand Canyon and how they felt about it is not known.
Written history, however, begins in September of 1540, when Captain Garcia López de Cardenas
and a contingent of Spanish conquistadors led by Hopi guides emerged from the pinyon
in Juniper Woodland and found themselves at the brink of the gorge.
After three days of struggling unsuccessfully to find a way down to the river, they left.
Of the view, they said little except that they could see the boulders, which turned
out to be taller than the Tower of Seville, and were surprised to learn that the river
was fifty times wider than the six feet they had estimated from the rim.
Three centuries later, another group of soldiers attempted to work their way up the Colorado
River, seeking the head of navigation.
First Lieutenant Joseph Christmased eyes and his men eagerly gazed into the mysterious
depths beyond.
When their steamboat, the Explorer, wrecked on submerged rocks in Black Canyon, near the
present-day site of Hoover Dam, they marched overland to Diamond Creek, where they became
the first non-native people to reach the Colorado River within the canyon.
Ives was greatly impressed by what he saw and commented that the region offered,
�A natural features whose strange sublimity is perhaps unparalleled in any part of the
world.�
He continued to marvel at the canyon�s picturesque forms, including its gigantic chasms, isolated
mountains and fissures so profound that the eye cannot penetrate their depths.
Despite his praise, a brief rhetorical flourish in his official report would gain notoriety.
Ives wrote, �The region is altogether valueless.
Ours has been the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this
profitless locality.�
It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.
Following the successful descent of the Colorado River 25 years later, however, a new breed
of scientists and explorers, ones with a different perspective and appreciation of the scenery,
would arrive.
In 1882, geologist Clarence Dutton, in his classic work, �The Tertiary History of the
Grand Canyon District,� often strayed from terraced technical prose.
His pen gushed, �At midday the clouds begin to gather, first in fleecy flecks, then in
cumuli throwing their shadows into the gulf, and the slumber of the chasm is disturbed.
The temples and cloisters seem to raise themselves half awake to greet the passing shadows.
Colors begin to glow.
The haze loses its opaque density and becomes more tenuous, responsive to every fluctuation
of light and shadow, like a delicate organism.�
Accompanying Dutton were artists such as the painter Thomas Moran and illustrator William
Henry Holmes.
Moran attempted to capture the canyon on canvas, not in literal transcripts, but as colorful,
romantic expressions of emotion.
Holmes, on the other hand, depicted the canyon in remarkably detailed line drawings, exposing
every stratum, cliff, and terrace.
Just twenty years later, in 1903, upon President Theodore Roosevelt's first visit to the canyon,
he would advise, �Believe it as it is.
You cannot improve upon it.
The ages have been at work, and man can only mar it.�
In fewer than fifty years, Grand Canyon had gone from being perceived as valueless to
being grand.
From its headwaters in the snowy, rocky mountains, the Colorado River writhes 1,450 miles on
its journey to the Gulf of California, draining an area the size of France.
From Lee's Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs, the river courses nearly 300 miles through
the bottom of Grand Canyon, cascading down 160 major rapids and descending 2,000 feet
on its journey to the sea.
For millennia, Native Americans have wondered about the great canyon and its river.
Inside Desert View Watchtower on the South Rim, Hopi artist Fred Kaboti has painted a
mural illustrating the story of Teo, who floated down the Colorado in a hollowed-out cottonwood
log, passing over smooth water and swift-flowing torrents, plunging down cataracts, getting
caught in wild whirlpools.
Teo eventually met Spider-Woman and was guided down into the sacred underworld, where he
was given knowledge of the snake dance and how to bring life-giving rain to the Hopi
people and their dry desert mesas.
At
the end of the last Ice Age, Indian hunters wandered across the American Southwest in
search of mammoths, Harrington's mountain goats, shrub oxen, and Shasta ground sloths.
Bones and scat from these beasts have been discovered in Grand Canyon along with part
of a 10,000-year-old stone spear point.
A thousand years later, mammoths became extinct in the Southwest and giant bison would become
the main prey.
Over the next several thousand years, a continuing warming, drying trend led to dramatic changes
in the canyon's plant and animal communities.
Most of the large Ice Age mammals had become extinct and the remaining herds of big game
drifted eastward onto the Great Plains and were promptly followed by the Indian hunters.
Then, a different group of people, possibly from the Great Basin, moved into the area.
This archaic culture depended more on wild plant foods than had their predecessors.
They hunted deer and bighorn sheep, not with a spear, but with a dart-throwing atlatl.
They used grinding stones to pulverize grasses and other seed crops into flour and carefully
crafted baskets, cordage, and nets of hair and vegetable fiber.
Like their predecessors, the archaic people moved seasonally and built temporary camps.
In Eastern Grand Canyon, they left enigmatic figurines fashioned from split willow twigs
in nearly inaccessible caves and created incredible panels of painted ghost-like beings.
By AD 200, several varieties of corn, introduced through trade with people from Mexico, were
being cultivated.
These early farmers explored the canyon looking for suitable farmland, hunting deer, and bighorn
sheep, and gathering pinion pine nuts, wild grasses, and cactus fruit.
Over the next 500 years, they built granaries, small cliff houses, and, occasionally, larger
pueblos on the rims or along the river.
At least five riverside dwellings are known to have kivas, or special ceremonial rooms.
As the centuries passed, more and more people moved into the canyon to sow beans, corn,
squash, and perhaps a little cotton.
The bow and arrow replaced the atlatl, exquisite pottery was fashioned, and mysterious paintings
and incised drawings were created.
Once known as the Anasazi, the farmers living in the eastern portion of the canyon are now
referred to as the ancestral Puebloan people.
By AD 1150, the Puebloan farmers had abandoned the area, possibly due to a combination of
depleted natural resources, overpopulation, and an extended drought.
Later, a shift to greater precipitation allowed some of these people to return and build settlements
along the rim, such as Tusia.
But less than a century later, they too had left.
Nonetheless, their Puebloan culture lives on in the Hopi, Zuni, and other native southwestern
people.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the ancestors of the modern Wallopi and Havasupai
people entered the region from the lower Colorado River Valley.
They spread as far east as the Little Colorado, but stayed primarily on the south side of
the river, living in circular brush wickyups.
About the same time, southern Paiutes were making seasonal trips from Utah to the Kaiba
Plateau to hunt deer and gather plants.
Today the southern Paiutes have a small reservation north of the canyon and west of Fredonia,
Arizona.
The Wallopi reservation stretches along the south rim of the canyon west of the park.
Most of the Havasupai people live in the village of Supai within the depths of Havasu Canyon.
The Navajo and Athabaskan speaking people arrived in the 16th century and are the most
recent Native American inhabitants of the region.
They are believed to have drifted south from Canada, stalking bison, elk, and pronghorn
before turning toward the southwest and encountering the canyon.
Their nomadic hunting culture was profoundly influenced and altered by contact with the
farming culture of their new neighbors, the Hopi, and later by European Americans.
By the mid-1800s, the Navajo were herding sheep, weaving blankets, and making silver
jewelry.
Today, the huge Navajo reservation, about the size of West Virginia, abuts the eastern
boundary of Grand Canyon.
Don't spend przod loads have a hard time puppet unit.
Each colorful layer of rock revealed in the walls of the canyon is a window back to a
different time and environment. The oldest rocks, those exposed at the very bottom of
the gorge, date back 1.7 billion years, an incomprehensibly long time ago. They are the
result of an ancient collision between two of the Earth's crustal plates that formed
mountains and produced intense heat at high pressure, altering and folding the existing
sedimentary and volcanic rocks into metamorphic schists and nices, known today as the Granite
Gorge Metamorphic Suite. 500 million years later, after erosion nearly worn these mountains
down to a level plane, an ocean invaded the region and began deposition of the Grand Canyon
Supergroup, a 12,000 foot thick collection of mud, sand, lime mud and volcanic material.
About 900 million years ago, these sediments were uplifted, faulted into blocks and tilted
to create mountains with intervening valleys. By 570 million years ago, this uplifted terrain
was eroded into a lowland of small hills and broad valleys. The blocks that had been faulted
downward were protected from erosion and are still visible as tilted layers along the river
in eastern Grand Canyon and also near the foot of the South Kaibab Trail. Resting atop
these very ancient rocks are the much younger horizontal beds that rise to the rim. The
point where the lowest flat-lying strata rests on the Granite Gorge Metamorphic Complex is
called the Great Unconformity and represents a time gap of 1.2 billion years. During the
time of the Great Unconformity, life on Earth was making the giant leap from single-celled
organisms to the development of animals with shells and other more complex creatures. By
the time the next ocean covered the region, some 550 million years ago, there had been
an explosion of new life forms. Within the Tonto Group, composed of sandstone, shale
and limestone deposited in this ocean, is an extraordinary fossil record of trilobites,
marine worms, jellyfish and other sea creatures. Slowly, the sea retreated and the surface
of the Tonto Group was exposed to erosion as streams and rivers meandered across it.
Sediments deposited in these river channels are known as Temple Butte Limestone. Another
long period of erosion was followed by the invasion of yet another warm, shallow sea
where more marine limestone was deposited. Within this limestone, fossilized marine life
forms from 330 million years ago reveal the fascinating record of past life on Earth.
These 500 to 800 foot thick deposits, known as Redwall Limestone, create the most prominent
cliff formations seen at the canyon today. The series of ledges, cliffs and minor slopes
immediately above the Redwall is the Supi Group. Its thousand feet of reddish rock is
composed of shale, siltstone, sandstone and some limestone. Iron oxides from these red
formations wash down and stain the surface of the Redwall. Above the Supi Group lie slopes
of the soft hermit shale where raindrop impressions and fossilized fern leaves and insect wings
are commonly found. Following the deposition of the hermit shale, winds from the north
cover the area with deep golden sand dunes. The dunes are preserved as the massive Coconino
sandstone where peculiar wedge-shaped patterns called crossbedding hint at its windblown origins.
Fossilized reptile tracks found in this formation almost always go up the bedding plains, rarely
down. A mystery solved by watching modern lizards on sand. In going uphill, the animals
tend to leave distinct tracks. Going down, the momentum of the lizard produces blurred
tracks. Eventually, the region was again submerged beneath the sea and more limestone, sandstone
and gypsum were deposited forming the toroweep formation. This was followed by the invasion
of yet another ocean. This sea teamed with brachiopods and also contained sponges, sea
lilies, mollusks and trilobites, leaving behind the Kaibab limestone. All during this transgression
and regression of seas, evolution was leading to vascular plants and the first fish as well
as the first life on land, amphibians and reptiles. Then, biological disaster struck.
About 250 million years ago, for reasons that are still not clear, a sweeping extinction
of mainly marine creatures occurred that, in terms of the number of species affected,
overshadows the later extinction of the dinosaurs. The next major geologic era witnessed a series
of mudflats and sandy deserts and the coming of the terrible lizards, dinosaurs, probably
4000 vertical feet of sandstone and shale covered the Grand Canyon region at that time,
but most have been eroded away over the last 65 to 70 million years. These and even younger
rocks still exist north and east of the canyon, forming the Vermilion Cliffs, Zion and Bryce
Canyon National Parks and small isolated remnants near the canyon, such as Cedar Mountain and
Red Butte. The story of how the canyon was carved is one of erosion, weathering and transport,
but the details remain shrouded in mystery. Geologists originally proposed that at one
time the ancestral Colorado River flowed across a relatively flat plain. As part of a plain
began to rise, forming the Kaibau Plateau, the river's relentless downcutting was able
to match the slow rising of the surrounding ground and the river's ancient course was
maintained. Geologists concluded that the canyon must be very old, perhaps 50 million
years or more. This was an elegant, beautifully simple theory, but it was wrong. More recently,
geologists have determined that the Kaibau Plateau was uplifted first and the canyon
later carved through it. Does this mean that the river had to flow uphill to get over the
Kaibau Plateau? Of course not, but it does present a perplexing problem. Furthermore,
the canyon seems to be relatively young, perhaps between 1.7 and 4.5 million years old, and
that's a mind-boggling amount of erosion in such a short geologic time. Perhaps more
than one river was involved. Geologists do agree that a river, or rivers, were responsible
for the downward cutting of Grand Canyon. They disagree, however, on the details. Other
types of erosion, such as wind, gravity, frost wedging and especially tributary streams flowing
into the Colorado, helped and continue to widen the canyon's profile. But the final
chapter on its creation is yet to be deciphered. In addition to being very deep, the canyon
is also strikingly asymmetrical. The south rim is about two miles from the river, whereas
the north rim is two to three times farther away. Since both rims dip slightly to the
south, rain hitting the south rim flows away from the canyon while precipitation landing
on the north rim tends to run into the canyon, cutting longer side canyons. Variations in
the relative hardness of the canyon's layers create the obvious stair-step profile seen
today. Soft layers create slopes, hard layers tend to form cliffs. After the canyon was
carved to nearly what we see today, molten rock oozed out of the cracks in the earth
and poured over the western Grand Canyon landscape. At least 12 times, magma flowed into the canyon,
hissing and sizzling as it met the Colorado River, where it cooled and hardened, forming
dams. Explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell remarked, �What a conflict of water and
fire! Imagine a river of molten rock running down into a river of melted snow. What a seething
and boiling of the waters! What clouds of steam rolled into the heavens!� The greatest
of these lava flows occurred about 1.2 million years ago and created a lake 2,300 feet deep
and more than 400 miles long. These natural reservoirs would fill quickly, overtop the
lava dams and wear them away. To view Grand Canyon is to peer through the window of time.
The scene is fraught with enigmatic answers to unresolved questions. As conservationist
John Muir wrote many years ago, �The whole canyon is a mine of fossils forming a grand
geological library.� Geologists have the challenging and rewarding task of reading
and understanding the story.
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John Wesley Powell, a school teacher and one-armed veteran of the Civil War, is the first to
hope to shed light on the central forces that formed the continent. This goal led to a plan
to explore the large blank area on the best maps of the time. He would descend the Green
River to its junction with the Grand, which was later renamed by the state of Colorado,
and continue down the Colorado. He would flesh out the terra incognito.
Powell had four wooden boats of his own design shipped to the Green River Station, Wyoming
Territory, and on May 24, 1869, he and his nine-man crew of volunteers pushed off into
the unknown. Rapids quickly extracted their toll. A boat was lost and one man left near
Fernal, Utah. On August 10, they arrived at the mouth of the Little Colorado River and
the beginning of the Great Unknown. Little did they realize how difficult the rapids
ahead would be. Endless days dragged on as the men toiled with the heavy boats, navigating
the rapids when they could, often lining or carrying the boats around unrunnable cascades.
Food was running short, and what they had left was spoiling. After three grueling months
on the river, they came upon yet another horrendous rapid, with no way to carry their boats around
it. Three men had had enough of the river and of Powell's arrogant, aloof leadership.
They hiked out toward the North Rim and were never seen again. As it turned out, this was
the last difficult rapid, and the next day, August 30, Powell and the five remaining men
emerged from the canyon. Powell's exploits made him a national hero.
Following Powell's journey, only a few brave, or perhaps foolhardy, souls challenged the
rapids over the next hundred years. Some were on government-sponsored expeditions, others
were just private adventurers. Two of the latter were a honeymoon couple, Glenn and
Bessie Hyde. In 1928, they plied the river in their homemade scow and got at least as
far as 232-mile rapid in western Grand Canyon, and then vanished. Their boat was found upright,
still containing their gear, including Bessie's cryptic diary. As a former park ranger put
it, in those days, the river never gave up its dead. Never.
Beginning in the 1950s, Georgie Clark White revolutionized river running by building huge
rafts out of Army surplus bridge pontoons. Her motorized G-rigs made the trip safer and
more appealing to novices, and Georgie's leopard print bathing suits became legendary.
Surprisingly, up until 1964, fewer than 1,000 people had gone down the river since Powell.
By 1972, however, more than 16,000 were enjoying the adventure annually, and today, more than
20,000 people float through the canyon each year.
As word spread about the wonders of Grand Canyon, surveyors, engineers, hunters, and
hopeful prospectors descended upon Canyon Country. Businessmen Ralph Cameron and his
brothers staked mining claims along what would become the Bright Angel Trail, and Pete Barry
discovered fairly rich deposits of copper below Grandview Point. Near Desert View, Seth
Tanner improved an old Indian trail down to the river, where he found copper and silver.
These early trails were rough, dangerous affairs. According to Franklin French, another prospector,
we called it a trail, but it was only a roughly marked out suggestion of where a trail ought
to be.
When mineral deposits proved to be small and transportation costs out of the canyon expensive,
some enterprising miners turned to tourism. In 1884, Mrs. Eyre from Flagstaff, Arizona,
became the first non-native American woman to descend into the central part of Grand
Canyon. Her guide was John Hans, a flamboyant miner who became one of the canyon's most
famous guides. One of his guests wrote, God made the canyon, John Hans, the trails. Without
the other, neither would be complete.
By the end of the 19th century, Grand Canyon was recognized as one of America's most scenic
natural wonders. President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the area as the Grand Canyon Forest
Preserve in 1893, but miners, stockmen, and settlers were quick to voice their opposition.
In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon for the first time and admonished
the American public, In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is absolutely
unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. In your own interests and in the interest
of the country, keep this great wonder of nature as it is now. Five years later, Roosevelt
established Grand Canyon National Monument by presidential proclamation. In 1919, Congress
finally passed legislation signed by President Woodrow Wilson, establishing Grand Canyon
National Park.
In the meantime, entrepreneur Bucky O'Neill decided to build a railroad line from Williams
to his copper mine south of the canyon. When his mine closed, the rail line went bankrupt,
but was purchased by the Santa Fe Railway, who finished laying tracks to the south rim.
On September 17, 1901, all 22 Grand Canyon village residents watched the first train
roll to a stop at the rim. Now, instead of a day or two jostling in a dusty stage from
Williams or Flagstaff, tourists could ride to the canyon in relative comfort in just
three hours. The Santa Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey Company took up the task of providing
lodging for the arriving visitors. In 1904, Chicago architect Charles F. Whittlesey was
commissioned to design a hotel on the rim. He combined the qualities of a Swiss chalet
with a Norway villa in his creation of the stately El Tovar Hotel. None of the 80 guest
rooms had a private bath, but the hotel did boast electricity provided by a steam generator.
In the same year, the Fred Harvey Company hired Mary Coulter, one of the first female
architects in the United States, to design a curio shop across from the hotel. Coulter
decided to model the structure after the ancient Hopi village of Araibi. Hopi House provided
living quarters for Hopi craftsmen and a store for the Harvey Company to sell Indian-made
arts and crafts. Coulter's lookout studio, completed in 1914, is made out of rough-cut
limestone and seems to grow naturally out of the rim's Kaibab limestone formation.
Within the canyon, her rusted cabins and a small lodge of river cobbles and logs replaced
an old tent cap along Bright Angel Creek to become Phantom Ranch, the only visitor accommodations
in the canyon's bottom. Another Coulter design that reflects the region's cultural history,
while still blending harmoniously with the environment, is the 1932 Desert View Watch
Tower. She not only wanted to design a building similar to the prehistoric towers built by
the ancient Puebloans, but also to construct a platform high enough to afford an unobstructed
view of the canyon, while still blending harmoniously with the environment. She wrote a 100-page
booklet to instruct Fred Harvey tour guides about the tour's genesis, the ceremonial
kiva-like ground floor, and the stories behind the numerous Indian symbols and paintings
on the interior walls. In 1935, Coulter oversaw extensive renovations and additions to Bright
Angel Lodge. The stones framing the 10-foot high fireplace, in what is now the lodge's
history room, were gathered from the various layers of rock within the canyon and arranged
in their proper geologic order. Across the canyon, on the more remote North Rim, the
splendid Grand Canyon Lodge, conceived by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, was
constructed in 1928. Tragically, the lodge burned in 1932, but was rebuilt five years
later with better fireproofing. Ironically, the Satafé Railway sponsored the first auto
adventure to the South Rim. On January 6, 1902, a steam-powered Toledo Locomobile was
expected to make the trip from Flagstaff to the canyon in less than four hours, but after
breaking down 30 miles short of their goal, already two days late, a team of mules was
employed to tow it the rest of the way to Grandview Point. Following World War II, Americans
began visiting the canyon in ever-increasing numbers, and most arrived in their own cars.
Train passenger numbers dwindled, and in 1968, the last train left the canyon with fewer
than 200 passengers. For two decades, the abandoned tracks rusted and ties rotted, and
trees and shrubs grew between the rails. Then, Phoenix businessman Max Begert decided to
reopen the line. Eighty-eight years to the day from the very first train's arrival, a
vintage steam engine, along with a trainload of passengers, was greeted by the thousands
at Grand Canyon Depot. While riding a mule to the canyon's bottom is still popular,
hikers far outnumber riders. But hiking in Grand Canyon is like mountain climbing in
reverse. The trailheads are at high elevation, and the trails, of course, go down. When you're
tired, blistered, and dusty, the hardest part of the trip, the climb out, is ahead of you.
Renowned Grand Canyon hiker Harvey Butchart succinctly warns, the Grand Canyon is not
the place for one's first experience in hiking. During the summer months, the inner canyon
can become a life-threatening oven, where temperatures occasionally soar to more than
115 degrees in the shade. Hikers must drink at least a gallon of water a day, or risk
heat exhaustion, sunstroke, or even death. Except for the Bright Angel, North and South
Kaibab, and a few short rim trails, many of the trails in the canyon are maintained on
a regular basis, and footing can be treacherous. From the south rim, the nine-mile-long Bright
Angel and the shorter but steeper South Kaibab drop and twist down to the river. There, two
bridges, the Old Kaibab Suspension Bridge and the newer Silver Bridge, cross the Colorado
to Phantom Ranch. Combining one of these trails with the 14.5-mile-long North Kaibab allows
a cross-canyon adventure.
Three of North America's major deserts meet in the Grand Canyon. On the Tonto platform
grow desert shrubs typical of the Great Basin. In the central part of the canyon, along
the Colorado River, grow Sonoran desert plants, while in the western Grand Canyon, species
of the Mojave Desert invade. On a warm September day in 1889, government biologist Clinton
Hart Merriam and his assistant Vernon Bailey stouted down a prospector's trail into the
Grand Canyon. They noted dramatic changes in the plant communities as they descended.
Growing on the rim were tall, stately ponderosa pines, and in cool, north-facing ravines,
a few Douglas and white firs were growing. A thousand feet below the rim, they passed
through a woodland of pinyon pines in Juniper. Another couple of thousand feet brought them
into the stark desert scrub of the Tonto platform, where black brush was common. Merriam's legs
gave out, but Bailey continued all the way to the Colorado River and reported more desert,
but this one included brittle brush, honey mesquite, and cat claw acacia. Biologically,
their hike was the equivalent of traveling from the forests of South Canada to the Sonoran
Desert of northern Mexico. If they had investigated the north rim, above 8,700 feet, they would
have encountered a boreal forest consisting of alpine, white, and Douglas fir, as well
as Engelman spruce interspersed with groves of quaking aspens. Merriam claimed temperature
was one of the major forces responsible for these changes. Dropping a thousand vertical
feet increases the temperature three to five degrees Fahrenheit. Further investigation
has shown that precipitation decreases at lower elevations. Which direction a slope
faces makes a tremendous difference in the microclimate as well. South-facing slopes
are hotter and drier than north-facing slopes. In addition, the type of soil and availability
of nutrients also contribute to which plants grow in a particular location. Merriam described
the plants and animals as living in broad, horizontal life zones. Where Merriam saw distinct
life zones, however, later biologists have revealed a blending from one plant community
to another. Like a rainbow, from a distance there appear to be individual colors, but
up close, the subtle gradation from one color to the next is revealed. And so it is with
plant and animal distribution.
Fires may occur almost daily during the summer. These brief, intense storms bring welcome
moisture to the canyon, especially the rims. However, the accompanying lightning also may
start fires. In the forests and woodlands along the rim, fire is nature's tool for
thinning the trees, and the native animals are adapted to living in a rather open forest.
Early forest managers presumed that all fires, regardless of cause, were detrimental and
attempted to extinguish the flames. This encouraged the survival of too many saplings, which has
led to unusually dense thickets along the rims. Each year, more and more dead needles,
leaves and branches accumulate on the forest floor. As a result, today fires have much
more fuel to burn and become extremely hot and ecologically destructive. A new policy
of allowing natural fires to burn themselves out and setting controlled prescribed burns
may rectify the situation.
The
Grand Canyon may appear timeless and eternal, but that is an illusion. Erosion continues
to slowly sculpt its walls, and living communities continue to evolve the way they always have.
But today, the hand of man also impacts this great natural wonder. The Grand Canyon's
lifeline, the Colorado River, now has concrete commas near the park's eastern and western
boundaries. The first large dam placed on the Colorado was Hoover, the tallest dam in
the world when it was completed in 1935. Its reservoir, Lake Mead, backs many miles into
the lower Grand Canyon.
Glen Canyon Dam, finished in 1963, is only 15 river miles upstream of Grand Canyon and
controls the flow of the Colorado, which wreaks havoc on the river's ecosystem and its banks.
The muddy river that was once too thick to drink, too thin to plow, has been turned into
a clear, cold stream. The annual spring floods that deposited new, sandy beaches and scoured
away riverside vegetation are history. Native fish have been replaced by exotic rainbow
trout that are devoured by the dozens of bald eagles who now overwinter in the canyon. Plants,
some native, some not, have invaded the river's banks, establishing a new, riparian habitat
where more insects can survive. These greater populations of insects increase the number
of swifts and swallows. They, in turn, are a ready food source for the peregrine falcons,
whose population has also grown dramatically. In fact, today, Grand Canyon supports the
highest density of breeding peregrines in the contiguous United States. In addition
to the changes wrought by dams, Grand Canyon faces many other threats as well, among them
air pollution from distant cities and power plants and the crush of summertime visitors.
The challenges are daunting, but conservation groups, such as the Grand Canyon Trust, are
attempting to raise awareness about the fragility of what is known as the Greater Grand Canyon
Area. Their goals include protecting the wildness of the region, maintaining and restoring the
health of the region's ecosystems, creating and promoting models for environmentally sustainable
human use and development, and building a strong constituency for conservation. No small
task indeed. In September of 2000, the National Park Service announced they are renewing their
efforts to protect and preserve the natural and cultural treasures found in the national
parks through a program called the Natural Resources Challenge. This program is designed
to give park managers a scientific basis for making decisions by inventorying plants, animals,
and other resources to broaden our knowledge and understanding of these priceless, irreplaceable
national treasures.
After surviving his exploration of the Colorado River in 1869, John Wesley Powell mused,
�The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech
nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic arts are taxed beyond their powers
in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. It is
the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the
storm gods play upon the rocks and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite
blue of heaven is unveiled. The adamant foundations of earth have been wrought into a sublime
harp upon which the clouds of the heavens play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.�
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Humankind has not yet witnessed Grand Canyon's finale. It is a work in progress. But even
this unfinished symphony and light and stone moves the human spirit. As Theodore Roosevelt
challenged us almost 100 years ago, what you can do is keep the Grand Canyon for your children,
your children's children, and for all who come after you. Keep it as the one great sight
which every American should see.�
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