More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot
There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. —Edward Abbey
Instead, it is a fiendishly elaborate maze in which so many tributaries fork off the main-stem gorge—some 740 of them, by one count—that for anyone attempting a traverse on foot, every mile of lateral progress along the main-stem canyon has to be paid for with an additional two and a half miles of detouring.
“The thing that distinguishes successful athletes from everybody else is a realization that your limits are not necessarily where you think
they are—and that your body is capable of doing more, often far more, than you expect it can.”
the insight that making one’s living in magnificent and beautiful landscapes wasn’t a job, but a privilege in the best sense of the word.
offered up a series of bright reminders that despite its many absurdities and cruelties, the world sometimes vibrates with a harrowing richness and wonder, and that each of those encounters represented a bestowal of grace that we were obliged to acknowledge by weaving our images and words into stories.
“Basically, it’s an invitation to do what he did—to venture out of bounds, beyond the trails, and find out what’s there.”
“The places that are most worth visiting—they’re never easy to get into or back out of, are they?” he said.
“This is a very powerful journey you are on, and by the time you have finished, you will realize that something in you has changed. But to really see the canyon—to touch and feel and hear everything about this place—you will have to pay attention.”
“Slow down. Listen. And take time to observe—especially the little things, like a lizard in the rocks, or maybe some birds flying by in the morning. Because all the creatures you will meet? They are trying to tell you something.” She paused, as if underscoring the importance of our remembering what came next. “Everything down there—all of it—is alive.”
Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached—and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves—only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.
No two slots were exactly alike, each extraordinary in its own way.
If the floods that wrought this destruction were sporadic and random, they occurred with considerably greater frequency than anyone had previously assumed. Although a slot might remain untouched for a hundred years, it was equally likely, depending on the alignment of storm cells and cloudbursts, for that same slot to be scoured down to bedrock once every three years.
become again. To this day, the Havasupai land restoration remains one of the largest pieces of real estate that the federal government has given back to a single tribe in the history of the United States.
“You know, there ought to be some places left like this, where you can get out and see how it once was—how it looked a thousand years ago, or a thousand years before that,” declared Rich, echoing his remarks from the previous evening. “It’s so important that these places remain unspoiled.”
How would it feel, I wondered, to be part of an unbroken human lineage that anchored you to this ground as deeply as a field of century plants—and by virtue of those roots, to know that the land belonged to you, and you belonged to the land,
You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
“Remember that you’re never moving toward water—you are always moving away from it.”
This is what astronomers call celestial vaulting, the revelatory effect produced by the rushing awareness of two opposing impressions: the sudden apprehension of the vastness and the depth of the heavens, combined with the arrival of a moment of understanding that transmits, in a single burst, the tininess and the insignificance of earth as well as everything that moves or breathes upon its surface.
A sky whose wildness can call forth and amplify the wildness of the land—and
‘Everything down there has remained pure because the land moves,’ ” I recited. “ ‘The land always moves.’ ”
“The acceleration of this kind of activity, this wave of industrialized, high-volume tourism, has been incredible,” said Rich. “Propagate forward fifteen years, is there anything left here? Have we really done what we set out to do—what Teddy Roosevelt set out to do—in letting the rest of the world come fly over Grand Canyon National Park?”
To truly know this world, it is necessary to move through it not by plane or raft or on the back of a mule, but on foot, hauling your gear and provisions on your back while moving through the space between the river and the rims.
Only on foot, the slowest and hardest way to move, can you hope to make contact with the finest parts of this landscape.
I had come to realize that the canyon is far too complex, too mysterious, too grand, for it to ever be known in
BENEDICTO May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where
...more
