Grand Cañon in Winter.
Probably from Lookout Point.
The pen itself is scarcely more effective than the pencil or camera. Folsom, who first wrote of the cañon, frankly owned that “language is entirely inadequate to convey a just conception of the awful grandeur and sublimity of this masterpiece of nature’s handiwork.” Time has shown this confession to be substantially true. From the clumsy work of the casual newspaper scribe, to the giddy flight of that eminent clergyman, who fancied he saw in this cañon a suitable hall for the great judgment, with the nations of the earth filing along the bottom upon waters “congealed and transfixed with the agitations of that day,” all descriptions do injustice to their subject. They fall short of their mark or overreach it. They are not true to nature. We shall therefore pass them by, with one exception, and shall commend our readers to a study of this great wonderwork from the pine-clad verge of the Grand Cañon itself.
The exception to which reference is made relates to the Grand Cañon in winter. It has been explained in another place why it is that the winter scenery of the Park must ever remain a sealed book except to those few hardy adventurers who are willing to brave the perils of winter travel in that region. It is a pleasure, therefore, to give at first hand what one of those intrepid spirits felt as he stood upon Lookout Point less than two years ago, and saw the famous cañon clad in its annual mantle of white. He says: [BO]
"I suppose thousands have stood grasping the stem of that same sturdy, ragged tree, and have looked in silence as we did. They have seen the cañon in summer, and I wish they might all see it also in the depth of winter. Now the glorious colors of the walls were gone, but the peaks and crosses and pinnacles were there, free of all color, but done in clean, perfect white. It was “frozen music”—the diapason of nature’s mightiest and most mysterious anthem all congealed in white, visible, palpable, authentic. No thinking man could stand there and not feel the exalted and compelling theme go thrilling to his heart."
[BO] E. Hough, in Forest and Stream, June 30, 1894, p. 553.
Terry Engr. Co.
U. S. Geological Survey.