12 Trip through the Grand Canyon by James Edson Stermer

11 Trip through the Grand Canyon by James Edson Stermer

"My trip through The Grand Canyon"
By
J. E. Stermer written about 1928

As I looked across the broad expanse of the Grand Canyon reason gave way to the more primitive forces with in – the emotions. Man is face to face with something foreign to anything he has ever experienced, there is nothing familiar to which he can cling. While looking across this panorama of peaks and towers, pinnacles and spires, castles and minarets of glowing colors and high lights, shadows and clouds blended by a blue haze, and over all, silence, I stood awed, drinking all this beauty into my soul.

I noticed that people become as lost children. Women weep and men mutter curses or prayers. I found, if you do neither you completely lose yourself. Most people are afraid to lose themselves, by tears and prayers they retain their identity and get back to normal. If you are not afraid, continue to drink what is in front of you. Your personality will be annihilated. There is no thought; there is a nothingness within the mind. All memories are banished, ambitions forgotten; there is a settling down, a becoming part of this, a something which feels the vibrations of colors; the tranquility of the blue, the quickening of the yellow, the stimulation of the red, the weirdness of the green, the soberness of the brown, and the supreme reverence of the purple.

These, to me seemed to be in broad bands, as if they were great chords of music seen with the soul in perfect union. Eternities lived in a moment. Then the reality of the present begins to take form: a consciousness that the blue is a turquoise sky meeting the violet north rim many miles away. The quickening yellows are the capping of the pinnacles and peaks towering from the bottom.

Going down into this gash, beneath the ivory are belts of brick red streaked with dirty yellow ribbons resting upon a layer of pale green sandstone hundreds of feet thick. This green stone had been eroded so that great fans of talus spread over reddish brown rock setting on a somber granite.

Down below, at the edge of a muddy yellow green flat, the Tonto Plateau, can be seen - the Colorado river gorge. If your eye follows the shadow of this ravine, far to the northwest is what appears to be a small silver thread winding its way through the granite walls. From the El Tovar Hotel on the rim to the river it is over twelve miles. After the brown in the Canyon’s beauty has sobered the mind, the most natural impulse is to see what it would be like looking up from the bottom. There are two ways of satisfying this urge, either going down on mule-back or walking.  Not having much money I walked.

With only a canteen of water, I left the hotel at nine-thirty in the morning, following the Bright Angel Trail down. I had descended only a thousand feet. Already I felt tired. I found a rake used to keep the trail in condition. I broke off the head, and the handle was as good as a Weiss mountaineer’s walking staff. Farther down the trail I came to a clump of cottonwood trees growing about the ruins of the old Half-Way House which in former days had been a saloon. Water is piped to this place from springs far up on the rock faces.

Here I met a “desert rat” who took me about. Telling me its history. He showed me the drift of a deserted mine hidden back of some brush. According to the “Rat”, it had yielded a low grade of copper, silver, and gold ore. From here on and for several miles the trail leads over the Tonto Plateau which is covered with pale green sandstone shale. It forks at the base of a high wall of red rock. One prong, the Bright Angel Train goes directly to the river. The other, the Tonto runs across this table round a granite gorge, then over the Turtle Head and finally joins the Kaibab which ends at the suspension bridge.

If you think this descent was an easy eleven mile jaunt you are badly mistaken. When I left it was a cool bracing autumnal morning, it had frosted during the night. As I dropped into this chasm it became hotter and hotter; at the bottom it was worse than a sultry day in July. I began to get light-headed from the heat. My ears began to buzz. I knew enough to make my head and hat wet, to pour water from my canteen on to my chest, shirt, and back; to lie and rest while I watched a rattlesnake wiggle away from my couch, -- a gigantic rock. The lightness having left my head, I started again, but my ears rang worse that ever.

I had to hold them shut with my hands as I walked along. It was a relief to swing into the Kaibab Trail below that plateau which had glared into my eyes and cause me to have such queer sensations. Rounding a turn, there, some two miles farther and at a drop of as many thousands of feet could be seen the Colorado.

Hurrah: I had gained sight of my goal. There was the thing that had during the countless ages cut its way through, not only one layer but all these colored layers of rock. I hurried. I was so anxious to get to the water’s edge, to put my hand in the water, to feel its force and the colored mud it uses as a tool to cut the rock. I did everything I wanted to do. I stretched out on a damp sand bar, took off my boots to bathe my feet and give them a much needed rest; lulled on the cool sands and looked into that blazing orb shedding its burning rays on me. Then I laughed. Laughed not once but many times, because I thought I had overcome so much.

It has been said, “If you want to be great, be alone”. I am alone in this, truly I was great. But how quickly my ego vanished among those towering pyramids lifting their heads from that eternity, the past, into that longer eternity, the future, how small and insignificant I became, for I represented the present. I was less to these symbols of time than the grains of sand at my feet were to the heights above me.

What had become of me? I had overcome the heat, the thirst, the fear of my own weakness. I realized how little I was. I amounted to nothing. These things looking from the ages would continue to be long after man and his words had disappeared. How little man became. How useless his desires to become famous in the eyes of others. It was terrible to lose one’s personality, to feel that everything so highly prized was a sham, to realize that the life of the individual amounts to nothing. That he is born to propagate the race – then die.

It dawned on me, if I stayed in the bottom I would lose all my preconceived ideas. It was time to leave. I pulled on my boots, refilled my canteen and left the river, I climbed up and up those zig-zagging switch-backs which never seemed to end; up through a red and brown inferno. The sun had heated the rocks all day and now the heat poured into my tired body. Sweat came out all over me. I could feel it trickle down my chest. I gasped for air. My head spun.

“Oh, God! I must rest!” Though I had only climbed two miles, I sank upon a huge square of red sandstone, flat on my back with arms and legs outspread. The fierce heated brazen sky sat like an inverted bowl on the rim. I knew I had to crawl up to it to get out. I tried to get up with what agony! Every fiber had set. Every muscle was sore and wracked with pain at the slightest move. My water was gone. I was thirsty, with five more miles to go and the rim thousands of feet above. It was enough to make one crazy. I was crazy, I was an obsession moving forward always up. The trail was only a few feet wide. “Why not step off and drop?” It would be so easy.

“No. Keep on going. You will get out some time if you keep moving, no matter how slowly. This is Life. Life is a continuous climb. It is one all must make and as we travel along we should help others.”

Rrrrrr-rr—my eyes popped out, hair on end, chills racing up and down my spine, heart pounding every muscle paralyzed, and covered with an icy ooze. The warning of a rattler coiled in the middle of the tail brought me to myself. What was I to do? I was over half way out, afraid to advance, too heartsick to turn back, to the right it was a sheer wall, and to the left a drop off – I dared not look. The dread of going back became greater than the fear of the snake. I timidly poked at it with the end of my walking staff. It struck – it coiled. Then I fought, fought until I had killed it. With vengeance I cut off the rattlers; there were ten of them. I was weak but I did get round to a point broad enough to lie down without fear.

As I lay there trying to regain composure, the last rays of the sun blazed through the canyon. Far below in back of the walls and pinnacles of the west were the richest of purples contrasting with the streaming golden luminescence flooding the towers and spires to the east bringing out every color in a new splendor. After the glorious struggles of the vanquished sun, came the shine of the stars to guide me through the mourning of the night.

Darkness crowded in with its chill and roused me from my rocky bed of ease. I had a little more than a mile to go before I came out on top. Of the last, I remember little, I walked the narrow trail along these towering cliffs, part of the time with my eyes shut, because I was so tired. I did not know I had landed on top until I stepped into a puddle of water. You will probably doubt the truth of this last statement, but if you have walked a long way, you are well-neigh exhausted, and the path is well roughened with tracks, your feet become so sensitive that they feel you are going aright.

From Yavapai Point where the Kaibab Trail begins it is four miles to the El Tovar Hotel. I walked to the hotel and arrived at ten o’clock at night. I have covered twenty-two miles in about thirteen hours on two quarts of water, with nothing to eat, passed from autumn to summer, through hell to heaven, learned that terrors may be found in beauty, and a combination of all these having a meaning for a man by making him think.