First of all, understand what the Grand Cañon is, and what it isn't. We ordinarily think of a cañon as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks, seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very seldom more than a few miles long. The Grand Cañon is nearly as long as from New York to Canada, as wide as the city of New York is long, and as deep straight as a plummet as the Canadian Rockies or lesser Alps are high. In other words, it is 217 miles long, from thirteen to twenty wide, and has a straight drop a mile deep, or seven miles as the trail zigzags down. You think of a cañon as a great trench between mountains. This one is a colossal trench with side cañons going off laterally its full length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone. Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot mountain, you have to go up. At the Grand Cañon, you come to the brink of the sagebrush plain and jump off—to climb these peaks. Peak after peak, you lose count of them in the mist of primrose fire and lilac light and purpling shadows. To climb these peaks, you go down, down 7,000 feet a good deal steeper than the ordinary stair and in places quite as steep as the Metropolitan Tower elevator. In fact, if the Metropolitan Tower and the Singer Building and the Flatiron and Washington's Shaft in the Capital City were piled one on top of another in a pinnacled pyramid, they would barely reach up one-seventh of the height of these massive peaks swimming in countless numbers in the color of the Cañon.
So much for dimensions! Now as to time. If you have only one day, you can dive in by train in the morning and out by night, and between times go to Sunrise Point or—if you are a robust walker—down Bright Angel Trail to the bank of the Colorado River, seven miles. If you have two days at your disposal, you can drive out to Grand View—fourteen miles—and overlook the panorama of the Cañon twenty miles in all directions. If you have more days yet at your disposal, there are good trips on wild trails to Dripping Springs and to Gertrude Point and to Cataract Cañon and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the Kaibab Plateau on the other side. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand Cañon a year and were not afraid of trailless trips, you could find a new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember that the Cañon itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral cañons uncounted.
When you reach El Tovar you are told two of the first things to do are take the drives—three miles each way—to Sunrise and to Sunset Points. Don't! Save your dollars, and walk them both. By carriage, the way leads through the pine woods back from the rim for three miles to each point. By walking, you can keep on an excellent trail close to the rim and do each in twenty minutes; for the foot trails are barely a mile long. Also by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. In fact, if you keep looking long enough through that lilac fire above seas of primrose mists, you can almost fancy those hoary old gods of Beauty and Power floating round angles of the massive lower mountains, shifting the scenes and beckoning one another from the wings of this huge amphitheater. The space-filling talker is still bawling out about "the mighty powers of erosion"; and a thin-faced curate is putting away a figure of speech about "Almighty Power" for his next sermon. Personally, I prefer the old pagan way of expressing these things in the short cut of a personifying god who did a smashing big business with the hammer of Thor, or the sea horses of Neptune or the forked lightnings of old loud-thundering Jove.
You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the Cañon; but unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the knees, you'll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the way down is steep as a stair and the distance is seven miles. In that case, better spend the night at the camp known as the Indian Gardens halfway down in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regular daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or you can join the regular tourist party both going down and coming up. Mainly because we wanted to see the sunrise, but also because a big party on a narrow trail is always unsafe and a gabbling crowd on a beautiful trail is always agony, two of us rose at four A. M. and walked down the trail during sunrise, leaving orders for a special guide to fetch mules down for us to the river. Space forbids details of the tramp, except to say it was worth the effort, twice over worth the effort in spite of knees that sent up pangs and protests for a week.
It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if rain brings out the colors of the Petrified Forests, you can imagine what it does to sunrise in a sea of blood-red mountain peaks. Much of the trail is at an angle of forty-five degrees; but it is wide and well shored up at the outer edge. The foliage lining the trail was dripping wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf in spangles of gold. An incense as of morning worship filled the air with the odor of cedars and cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds below the Cañon rim than above it; and the dawn was filled with snatches of song from bluebirds and yellow finches and water ousels, whose notes were like the tinkle of pure water. What looked like a tiny red hillock from the rim above is now seen to be a mighty mountain, four, five, seven thousand feet from river to peak, with walls smooth as if planed by the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between these peaks would be dignified by the names of cañons. Here, they are mere wings to the main stage setting of the Grand Cañon. We reached the Indian Garden's Camp in time for breakfast and rested an hour before going on down to the river. The trail followed a gentle descent over sand-hills and rocky plateaus at first, then suddenly it began to drop sheer in the section known as the Devil's Corkscrew. The heat became sizzling as you descended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the stupendous height and sheer sides of the brilliantly colored gorges and masses of shadows above. Then the Devil's Corkscrew fell into a sandy dell where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst would fill this gorge in about a jiffy; but a cloudburst is the last thing on earth you need expect in this land of scant showers and no water. Suddenly, you turn a rock angle, and the yellow, muddy, turbulent flood of the Colorado swirls past you, tempestuous, noisy, sullen and dark, filling the narrow cañon with the war of rock against water. What seemed to be mere foothills far above, now appear colossal peaks sheer up and down, penning the angry river between black walls. It was no longer hot. We could hear a thunder shower reverberating back in some of the valleys of the Cañon; and the rain falling between us and the red rocks was as a curtain to the scene shifting of those old earth and mountain and water gods hiding in the wings of the vast amphitheater.
And if you want a wilder, more eery trail than down Bright Angel, go from Dripping Springs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great many wild mountain trails in the Rockies, North and South; but I have never known one that will give more thrills from its sheer beauty and sheer daring. You go out round the ledges of precipice after precipice, where nothing holds you back from a fall 7,000 feet straight as a stone could drop, nothing but the sure-footedness of your horse; out and out, round and round peak after peak, till you are on the tip top and outer edge of one of the highest mountains in the Cañon. This is the trail of old Louis Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the center of the Cañon and built his own trail to one of its grandest haunts. Louis used to live under the arch formed by the Dripping Springs; but Louis has long since left, and the trail is falling away and is now one for a horse that can walk on air and a head that doesn't feel the sensations of champagne when looking down a straight 7,000 feet into darkness. If you like that kind of a trail, take the trip; for it is the best and wildest view of the Cañon; but take two days to it, and sleep at Louis' deserted camp under the Dripping Springs. Yet if you don't like a trail where you wonder if you remembered to make your will and what would happen if the gravel slipped from your horse's feet one of these places where the next turn seems to jump off into atmosphere, then wait; for the day must surely come when all of the Grand Cañon's 217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American public as Egypt.