It adds seriously to the scientific wonder and the universal impressiveness of this unparalleled chasm that it is not in some stupendous mountain range, but in a vast, arid, lofty floor of nearly 100,000 square miles—as it were, a crack in the upper story of the continent. There is no preparation for it. Unless you had been told, you would no more dream that out yonder amid the pines the flat earth is slashed to its very bowels, than you would expect to find an iceberg in Broadway. With a very ordinary running jump from the spot where you get your first glimpse of the canyon you could go down 2,000 feet without touching. It is sudden as a well.
But it is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 feet deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. It is like a dissection of the whole cosmogony. And the purple shadows, the dazzling lights, the thunderstorms and snowstorms, the clouds and the rainbows that shift and drift in that vast subterranean arena below your feet! And amid those enchanted towers and castles which the vastness of the scale leads you to call “rocks,” but which are in fact as big above the river-bed as the Rockies from Denver, and bigger than Mount Washington from Fabyan’s or the Glen!
The Grand Canyon country is not only the hugest, but the most varied and instructive example on earth of one of the chief factors of earth-building—erosion. It is the mesa country—the Land of Tables. Nowhere else on the footstool is there such an example of deep-gnawing water or of water high-carving. The sandstone mesas of the Southwest, the terracing of canyon walls, the castellation, battlementing, and cliff-making, the cutting down of a whole landscape except its precipitous islands of flat-topped rock, the thin lava table-cloths on tables 100 feet high—these are a few of the things which make the Southwest wonderful alike to the scientist and the mere sight-seer.
That the canyon is not “too hard” is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the fact that I have taken thither ladies and children and men in their seventies, when the easiest way to get there was by a 70-mile stage ride, and that at six years old my little girl walked all the way from rim to bottom of canyon and came back on a horse the same day, and was next morning ready to go on a long tramp along the rim.
Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody. The North Wall from Grand Scenic Divide.
INFORMATION FOR TOURISTS
Preliminary
There is only one way by which to directly reach the Grand Canyon of Arizona, and that is via the Santa Fe (The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway System).