This is usually the moment when I get into some inane argument about the hypocrisy of the rules that I can’t possibly win and that usually ends up making the situation worse. I once got my brother and I thrown out of a bar in Hawaii because the policy was that you couldn’t order more than two shots per visit. No matter how long you took to drink them. You could have as many drinks as you think you can hold. You can order several drinks with multiple shots in them…but you couldn’t have more than two shots per visit. “Dumb rule”, I told the bartender…maybe not in that exact language. “Dumber argument”, my brother told me after we were asked to leave…in that exact language.

But not today. Malia saw it coming and interceded. “I think it’s too long for Kaila anyway”, she said. “We’ll stay with the dogs, you guys go and we’ll pick you up around sunset” Bomb defused…Damn! I gave the Ranger the “Oh you’re soooo lucky that I don’t have the time to sink your battleship” look. And she in return gave me the “whatever, you’re such an idiot” look, and we were off.

Buckey Oneill was an adventurer. In 1879 at the ripe old age of nineteen he left Missouri bound for the Arizona Territory. For better or worse Buckey had a big impact on the Grand Canyon. He brought the railroad to the South Rim and helped to turn the Bright Angel trail into a path that could be negotiated by people other than hunters and gatherers. The bunkhouse he built for himself still stands on the South Rim near the head of the Bright Angel trail. Unfortunately for him, Buckey also became a soldier. Joining Teddy Roosevelt’s famed rough riders earned him his death during the battle of San Juan Hill. He was thirty-eight. We reflected for a moment on an interesting life cut short that also probably ended a few other lives prematurely, and turned towards the trail.

The trail is fairly narrow and descends steeply with steep and dramatic drops on it’s side. It Zig zags it’s way back and forth across the sheer cliff faces. Some sections have colorful names like “the devils cork screw”…all of them are hard earned. For example, just above the devils corkscrew is where the Rangers do a great deal of body recovery. Because the popular areas of the canyon rim where people dazzle their friends with daring acts of bravery are directly over the trail here.

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DEVIL’S CORKSCREW

About a half mile down the trail a fellow hiker alerted us to some amazing petroglyphs. They were the quintessential red triangular figures of hunters and their prey. I asked Wyatt and Carson if they thought those early people who painted on walls were performing acts of graffiti that upset the other members of their group. They gave me the courtesy of feigned interest, rolled their eyes, and ushered me down the trail.

Since we didn’t have the girls or the dogs, and we wanted to make it all the way down, we set out at a pretty good clip. A mile and a half down is a rest house with shade and water. At this point there’s still quite a few people on the trail. Going down from the rest house the crowd thins greatly. Three miles down – and I mean DOWN – is another rest house. My guess is that there were less than fifty people at the first house. There were only four at the three mile house. All on their way back up. Past the three mile house we saw only three hikers on their way back up.

It was easily ninety degrees, twenty degrees hotter than the rim. Water wasn’t a problem but the two and a half hours of steep downhill added up and it made us ever so grateful for the flat land we found on the plateau nearly four thousand feet down into the canyon.

HALF WAY DOWN THE BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL

We entered the Indian Garden. A luscious grove of dozens of twenty foot tall, spring fed trees that traces it’s origins to the Yavapai people more than one hundred fifty years ago. It seems out of place, but really in an area so diverse split by a river possessing the carving power of the mighty Colorado, it’s hard to say that anything couldn’t be there.

We stepped from the garden onto the plateau and try to take it all in. The overwhelming majority of the pictures of the Grand Canyon are taken rim high, and for most the Grand Canyon experience is a top down affair. We reversed it and brought a sense of scale to it. Vertical cliffs of nearly four thousand feet striated with an amazing array of color surrounded us. We were whispering to each other as if in a cathedral and it still sounded like we’re yelling. Large birds soared so high over our heads that we could barely see them. And in the distance the muffled roar of the creator of all of this majesty. Almost two hundred eighty river miles…two thousand six hundred miles of rim…thousands of temples…all largely UNEXPLORED.

Wildness! No fences. One thin dusty line pointing us towards a great unknown. No more rules. No more safety net. A dormant part of my mind stirred. Ancient instincts rebooted and started to make themselves known. The wind blew down the Colorado Plateau with a message for us. “Don’t even think about it.” It said. “You’re fleas on the back of an elephant.” “I am of time and energy that you cannot possibly imagine.” “I was here in a form when the dinosaurs walked the earth and I’ll be here long after your species has vanished.” We were humbled and put in our place. Perspective came to us.

More than two thousand miles we had driven. Two and a half months on the road in deserts and forests and this is the first wildness we had encountered. I don’t recall it being so hard to find. I don’t recall nature feeling so safe. I think the current belief that we have to mange these spaces, and keep them in the form that we believe they should be in, has homogenized their state and de-wilded them. And in the course of these actions we have domesticated ourselves. Prioritizing luxury over adventure too many of us have distanced ourselves from the wilds, but we crave them. Count the number of reality shows dedicated to survival, or adventure that millions watch from their velvet lined prisons. We have come to define ourselves as separate from nature inasmuch as we see it as something we are outside of, something to be managed, controlled, and dominated. Yet we can’t possibly conceive of ourselves without including it. Too many view the nature parks like an amusement park. Exciting but without the will to kill. They walk the walls above the devils corkscrew and swim in the river at the mouth of Vernal Falls. And when something inevitably goes wrong they act like the system has failed them, as if someone should have warned them.

In the same way that you can feel a turbulent flight hours later, the sensation that the wildness brought to us remains. It’s so clear to me how little we know and the great lengths to which we’ve gone to hide that from ourselves. We live our itty bitty lives against the backdrop of billions of years. A time frame so great that it is beyond our comprehension. Yet we act as if we are in charge. We live on a rock hurtling through space at millions of miles an hour. Yet we think we’re in control. And when we occasionally look up we find ourselves in the midst of something so incredibly large and complex that it throws us out of thought. Yet we think we understand.