I began exploring the Grand Canyon during my first year at Prescott College: two short raft trips from Diamond Creek to Pearce Ferry, a hard hike from Apache Point to Royal Arch Creek, then a full Colorado River run from Lee's Ferry to Diamond Creek. In the next few years I explored all of the south side's rim-to-river trails, from the Little Colorado River to the South Bass, tracked the Tonto Trail in its entirety, worked a summer as a research assistant on a fire ecology study on the North Rim, fit in two more river trips. I grew to love the place, from the highest spruce-fir forests on the Kaibab Plateau to the lowest alluvial fans spilling out of canyons draining the country near Diamond Creek. Then came the 1980s and 1990s; except for one river trip I mostly stayed away, drawn elsewhere by work and responsibility. Fortunately, starting in 2003 I began returning to the Canyon - lots of hiking trips along the way, and (finally) another private raft trip in the summer of 2014.
I love the Canyon's many moods and habitats, and each time that I stand on the rim and gaze out on its vastness, it's as though I am discovering it anew - that same unexpected sense of power and grandeur and beauty. To paraphrase the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po, "We never grow tired of each other / the canyon and I." What draws me most strongly, I think, is the Canyon's ability to immerse me in deep time, on a scale calibrated in tens of million years, from the deepest basement rocks of the Vishnu Schist (1.2 billion years old) to the capstone layer of Kaibab Limestone (270 million years old). Such antiquity places the human lifespan in its proper perspective.