Part 3

When the clouds play in the canyon, as they often do in the rainy season, another set of effects is produced. Clouds creep out of canyons and wind into other canyons. The heavens seem to be alive, not moving as move the heavens over a plain, in one direction with the wind, but following the multiplied courses of these gorges. In this manner the little clouds seem to be individualized, to have wills and souls of their own and to be going on diverse errands—a vast assemblage of self-willed clouds faring here and there, intent upon purposes hidden in their own breasts. In imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and when they are in the canyon the skies come down into the gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift them up to immeasurable heights, for the sky must still be far away. Thus they lend infinity to the walls.

You can not see the Grand Canyon in one view as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of paradise.

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD BY CHARLES F. LUMMIS

“The greatest thing in the world.” That is a large phrase and an over-worked one, and hardened travelers do not take it lightly upon the tongue. Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those but lately, and for the first time, wandered beyond their native state or county, and as every province has its own local brag of biggest things, the too credulous tourist will find a superlative everywhere. And superlatives are unsafe without wide horizons of comparison.

Yet in every sort there is, of course, somewhere “the biggest thing in the world” of its kind. It is a good word, when spoken in season and not abused in careless ignorance.

I believe there is and can be no dispute that the term applies literally to several things in the immediate region of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. As I have more than once written (and it never yet has been controverted), probably no other equal area on earth contains so many supreme marvels of so many kinds—so many astounding sights, so many masterpieces of Nature’s handiwork, so vast and conclusive an encyclopedia of the world-building processes, so impressive monuments of prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation—as what I have called the Southwestern Wonderland. This includes a large part of New Mexico and Arizona, the area which geographically and ethnographically we may count as the Grand Canyon region. Let me mention a few wonders:

The largest and by far the most beautiful of all petrified forests, with several hundred square miles whose surface is carpeted with agate chips and dotted with agate trunks two to four feet in diameter; and just across one valley a buried “forest” whose huge silicified—not agatized—logs show their ends under fifty feet of sandstone.

The largest natural bridge in the world—200 feet high, over 500 feet span, and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on its top and miles of stalactite caves under its abutments.

The largest variety and display of geologically recent volcanic action in North America; with 60-mile lava flows, 1,500-foot blankets of creamy tufa cut by scores of canyons; hundreds of craters and thousands of square miles of lava beds, basalt, and cinders, and so much “volcanic glass” (obsidian) that it was the chief tool of the prehistoric population.

The largest and the most impressive villages of cave-dwellings in the world, most of them already abandoned “when the world-seeking Genoese” sailed.

The peerless and many-storied cliff-dwellings—castles and forts and homes in the face of wild precipices or upon their tops—an aboriginal architecture as remarkable as any in any land.

The twenty-six strange communal town republics of the descendants of the “cliff-dwellers,” the modern Pueblos; some in fertile valleys, some (like Acoma and Moki) perched on barren and dizzy cliff tops. The strange dances, rites, dress, and customs of this ancient people who had solved the problem of irrigation, 6-story house building, and clean self-government, and even women’s rights—long before Columbus was born.

The noblest Caucasian ruins in America, north of Mexico—the great stone and adobe churches reared by Franciscan missionaries, near three centuries ago, a thousand miles from the ocean, in the heart of the Southwest.

Some of the most notable tribes of savage nomads—like the Navajos, whose blankets and silver work are pre-eminent, and the Apaches, who, man for man, have been probably the most successful warriors in history.

All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland without a parallel. There are ruins as striking as the storied ones along the Rhine, and far more remarkable. There are peoples as picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural wonders which have no peers whatever.

Of the Canyon, and Other Wonders

At the head of the list stands the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; whether it is the “greatest wonder of the world” depends a little on our definition of “wonder.” Possibly it is no more wonderful than the fact that so tiny a fraction of the people who confess themselves the smartest in the world have ever seen it. As a people we dodder abroad to see scenery incomparably inferior.

But beyond peradventure it is the greatest chasm in the world, and the most superb. Enough globe-trotters have seen it to establish that fact. Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness thereof. But I never knew the most self-satisfied veteran traveler to be disappointed in the Grand Canyon, or to patronize it. On the contrary, this is the very class of men who can best comprehend it, and I have seen them fairly break down in its awful presence.

I do not know the Himalayas except by photograph and the testimony of men who have explored and climbed them, and who found the Grand Canyon an absolutely new experience. But I know the American continents pretty well, and have tramped their mountains, including the Andes—the next highest mountains in the world, after half a dozen of the Himalayas—and of all the famous quebradas of the Andes there is not one that would count 5 per cent on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. For all their 25,000-foot peaks, their blue-white glaciers, imminent above the bald plateau, and green little bolsones (“pocket valleys”) of Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador; for all their tremendous active volcanoes, like Saugay and Cotopaxi; for all an earthquake activity beside which the “shake” at Charleston was mere paper-doll play; for all the steepest gradients in the world (and Peru is the only place in the world where a river falls 17,000 feet in 100 miles)—in all that marvelous 3,000-mile procession of giantism there is not one canyon which any sane person would for an instant compare with that titanic gash that the Colorado has chiseled through a comparatively flat upland. Nor is there anything remotely approaching it in all the New World. So much I can say at first hand. As for the Old World, the explorer who shall find a gorge there one-half as great will win undying fame.

The quebrada of the Apu-Rimac is a marvel of the Andes, with its vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand Canyon of the Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the mountains. The Franconia and White Mountain notches in New Hampshire are beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world, each in its way. But if all of these were hung up on the opposite wall of the Grand Canyon from you the chances are fifty to one that you could not tell t’other from which, nor any of them from the hundreds of other canyons which rib that vast vertebrate gorge. If the falls of Niagara were installed in the Grand Canyon between your visits and you knew it by the newspapers—next time you stood on that dizzy rimrock you would probably need good field-glasses and much patience before you could locate that cataract which in its place looks pretty big. If Mount Washington were plucked up bodily by the roots—not from where you see it, but from sea-level—and carefully set down in the Grand Canyon, you probably would not notice it next morning, unless its dull colors distinguished it in that innumerable congress of larger and painted giants.

All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand Canyon. But I fancy there is no standard adjustable to the human mind. You may compare all you will—eloquently and from wide experience, and at last all similes fail. The Grand Canyon is just the Grand Canyon, and that is all you can say. I never have seen anyone who was prepared for it. I never have seen anyone who could grasp it in a week’s hard exploration; nor anyone, except some rare Philistine, who could even think he had grasped it. I have seen people rave over it; better people struck dumb with it, even strong men who cried over it; but I have never yet seen the man or woman that _expected_ it.

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.

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).

There are three ways of reaching the Canyon from the Santa Fe—rail from Williams, private conveyance from Flagstaff and Peach Springs.

The route from Flagstaff is not available in winter. The Peach Springs route is open in winter, but now little used. The bulk of the travel is via Williams, sixty-five miles north to Bright Angel—open all the year.

Three Gateways

There are but three points from which an easy descent may be made of the south wall to the granite gorge of the Grand Canyon:

1. At Grand View, down Berry’s (Grand View) or Hance’s (Red Canyon) trails.

2. At Bright Angel, down Bright Angel Trail.

3. At Bass’ Camp, down Mystic Spring Trail.

While the canyon may be reached over trails at other places outside of the district named (such as Lee’s Ferry Trail, by wagon from Winslow; Moki Indian Trail, by way of Little Colorado Canyon; and Diamond Creek road to Colorado River from Peach Springs station), most tourists prefer the Bright Angel, Grand View, and Bass’ Camp routes, because of the superior facilities and views there offered. The Peach Springs route is the only other one now used by the public to any extent.

It is near Grand View that Marble Canyon ends and the Grand Canyon proper begins. Northward, a few miles away, is the mouth of the Little Colorado Canyon. Here the granite gorge is first seen.

Bright Angel is approximately in the center, and Bass’ Camp at the western end of the granite gorge. By wagon road it is eighteen miles from Bright Angel east to Grand View, and twenty-three miles west to Bass’ Camp.

In a nutshell, the Grand Canyon at Grand View is accounted most sublime—a scene of wide outlooks and brilliant hues; at Bright Angel, deepest and most impressive—a scene that awakens the profoundest emotions; at Bass’ Camp, the most varied—a scene of striking contrasts in form and color.

Each locality has its special charm. All three should be visited, if time permits, as only by long observation can one gain even a superficial knowledge of what the Grand Canyon is. To know it intimately requires a longer stay and more careful study.

The Ride from Williams

Because of recent improvements in service the Grand Canyon of Arizona may now be visited, either in summer or winter, with reasonable comfort and without any hardship. No one need be deterred by fear of inclement weather or a tedious stage ride. The trip is entirely feasible for the average traveler every day in the year.

Leaving the Santa Fe transcontinental train at Williams, Arizona, passengers change in same depot to a local train of the Grand Canyon Railway, which leaves Williams daily, and arrives at destination after a three hours’ run.

Williams is a busy town of 1,500 inhabitants, 378 miles west of Albuquerque, on the Santa Fe. Here are located large sawmills, smelters, numerous well-stocked stores, and railroad division buildings. Prior to the disastrous fire in July, 1901, there were several excellent hotels. The one not destroyed affords good accommodations; it has been recently enlarged and otherwise improved.

There is usually ample time at Williams, between trains, for the ascent of Bill Williams Mountain, which rises near the town to a height of 9,000 feet. Tourists will find the trip thoroughly enjoyable. It can be made in five hours on horseback in perfect safety. The trail is an easy one, first leading through a gently sloping path of pines, then steeply up to the wind-swept summit alongside a pretty stream bordered by thickets of quaking aspens. Chimney Rock, with its eagle’s nest, is a noteworthy rock formation. On the summit is buried the historic pioneer scout, Bill Williams. From his resting-place there is a wide outlook, embracing, on clear days, the wall of the Grand Canyon, Verde River, Chino Valley, Jerome, Hell Canyon, Seligman, Ash Fork, and many neighboring peaks.

The railroad track to the canyon is remarkably smooth for a new line. It is built across a slightly rolling mesa, in places thickly wooded, in others open. The snow-covered San Francisco Peaks are on the eastern horizon. Kendricks, Sitgreaves, and Williams mountains are also visible. Red Butte, thirty miles distant, is a prominent local landmark. Before the terminus is reached the train climbs a long, high ridge and enters Coconino Forest, which resembles a natural park. The route here is amid fragrant pines, over low hills, and along occasional gulches and “washes.” Taken under the favorable conditions which generally prevail at this high altitude, the journey is a novelty and a delight.

At Destination

The hotel at head of Bright Angel Trail is reached early in the evening. The tourist then finds himself on the verge of a high precipice, from which is obtained by moonlight a magnificent view of the opposite wall and of the intervening crags, towers, and slopes. The suddenness, the surprise, the revelation come as a fitting climax to a unique trip. After nightfall the air becomes cold, for here you are 7,000 feet above the sea; yet the absence of humidity, peculiar to these high altitudes, makes the chill less penetrating than on lower levels. By day, in the sunshine, there is usually a genial warmth—then overcoats, gloves, and wraps are laid aside.

Bright Angel Hotel

The Bright Angel Hotel is managed by Mr. M. Buggeln, who also controls the stage line, trail stock, guides, etc. The hotel comprises a combination log and frame structure of eight rooms, with three frame annexes containing forty-six sleeping rooms, and (for summer use) several rows of tents, all clustered on the rim and surrounded by pines and spruces. Each room in the annexes has one or two beds, a stove, dressing table, and Navajo rugs. In the log-cabin part of the main edifice are two large rooms. One is used for reception purposes, being warmed by means of an old-fashioned fireplace and tastefully carpeted with Indian rugs, also furnished with capacious rocking chairs and a piano; the other of these two rooms is for the office.

Good meals are prepared by expert cooks and served in a pleasant dining-room. In a word, the hotel facilities are good, far better than one might expect to find for the reasonable rate charged. There is no “roughing it”; everything is homelike and comfortable. One must not, however, expect all the city luxuries. A telephone and telegraph line directly connects the hotel with the outer world at Williams.

Note.—A fine modern hotel of fifty rooms, with cottage annexes, to be known as Bright Angel Tavern, will be built in this vicinity during 1903 and managed by Mr. Fred Harvey. It will be a permanent affair and will provide all the latest conveniences.

While one ought to remain at least a week, a stop-over of three days from the transcontinental trip will allow practically two days at the canyon. One full day should be devoted to an excursion down Bright Angel Trail, and the other to walks and drives along the rim. Another day on the rim—making a four-days’ stop-over in all—will enable visitors to get more satisfactory views of this stupendous wonder.

Down Bright Angel Trail

The trail here is perfectly safe and is generally open the year round. In midwinter it is liable to be closed for a few days at the top by snow, but such blockade is only temporary. It reaches from the hotel four miles to the top of the granite wall immediately overlooking the Colorado River. At this point the river is 1,200 feet below, while the hotel on the rim is 4,300 feet above. The trip is commonly made on horseback, accompanied by a guide; charges for trail stock and services of guide are moderate. A strong person, accustomed to mountain climbing, can make the round trip on foot in one day, by starting early enough; but the average traveler will soon discover that a horse is a necessity, especially for the upward climb.

Eight hours are required for going down and coming back, allowing two hours for lunch, rest, and sight-seeing. Those wishing to reach the river leave the main trail at Indian Garden Spring and follow the downward course of Willow and Pipe creeks. Owing to the abrupt descent from this point, part of the side trail must be traversed on foot. Provision is made for those wishing to camp out at night on the river’s edge.

The famous guide, John Hance, is now located at Bright Angel.

What to Bring

If much tramping is done, stout, thick shoes should be provided. Ladies will find that short walking skirts are a convenience; divided skirts are preferable, but not essential, for the horseback journey down the zigzag trail. Traveling caps and (in summer) broad-brimmed straw hats are useful toilet adjuncts. Otherwise ordinary clothing will suffice. A good field glass and camera should be brought along.

The round-trip ticket rate, Williams to Grand Canyon and return, is only $6.50. Adding $6 for two days’ stay at Canyon Hotel, $1 for part of a day at hotel in Williams, $1.50 for probable proportion of cost of guide, $3 for trail stock, and the total necessary expense of the three days’ stop-over is about $18 for one person; each additional day only adds $3 to the cost for hotel.

Stop-overs will be granted at Williams on railroad and Pullman tickets if advance application is made to train and Pullman conductors. Trunks may be stored in the station at Williams free of charge by arrangement with ticket agent.

Grand View

Grand View (previously mentioned) may be reached in summer by private conveyance from Flagstaff, a distance of seventy-five miles; or at any time of the year by stage from Bright Angel, sixteen miles along the rim. The rate for round trip, Bright Angel to Grand View, is $2.50 to $5 each person, according to size of party. While Flagstaff is an interesting place to visit—with its near-by cliff and cave dwellings and San Francisco Peaks—and the trip thence to the Grand Canyon is a novel one, distance and time are such that most travelers prefer to go in by railroad from Williams.

Grand View Hotel is a large, rustic structure, built near the head of Berry’s Trail and about three miles from Hance’s Trail, in the midst of tall pines and overlooking the mighty bend of the Colorado. This is the point to which visitors were conducted in the days of the old stage line from Flagstaff.

It is noted for its wide views of the Coconino Forest and Painted Desert, as well as for the beautiful forms and color of the canyon itself. A favorite trip here is to go down one trail and up the other. The hotel accommodations are quite good; capacity, forty guests; rate, $3 per day.

Bass’ Camp