Grand Canyon

SEVERAL BRANDS OF GRAND: The mighty Colorado flows through the Grand Canyon as seen from the East Rim (top); the elks feed while the trailer stands witness in the background (bottom); and your correspondent strapped in and ready for liftoff of the chopper (right).


THE LANGUAGE GAP

Strolling along a picturesque northern Arizona walkway one beautiful afternoon, I felt like a stranger in strange land.
I overheard many foreign languages – French, German, some Italian and a smattering of Nordic tongues. I spied some Chinese folks and a busload of Japanese tourists. There was a Korean family, along with a Pakistani couple, with that telltale sing-song lilt to their voices, and a couple of Aussie chaps yakking it up, having a good time.
The only words in short supply seemed to be the good old-fashioned King’s English -- American style (and this, oddly enough, was good for me for, at long last, I wasn’t the one with a funny accent.)
Now, this is only a guess, but I’d venture that the multitude of overseas travelers outnumbered natives here at one of “The Seven Wonders of the World” – The Grand Canyon - by a ratio of 4- or 5-to-1.
And I think that’s great!
I say, Bring ‘em on over! The more the merrier!
Let these folks fly in, cash in their shekels, schillings or what have you nowadays, turn them into greenbacks and spend every last dollar right here.
Good for them. Better for us!
They may go back home broke, but they’ll take some fond memories with them, along with their big stack of photos. Every single one was either snapping pictures or posing for them, using a scenic backdrop that’s the granddaddy of them all.
Come for the snapshots, stay ‘til the last Travelers Check is cashed.
This crease in our country is a cash cow! And exploiting that fact is The American Way.

After securing a campsite in an RV park at Tusayan, Arizona, about a mile south of the park gate, I drove up to the South Rim, parking near the access to the Mather Point walkway and the overlooks at the Yavapai and Yaki Points. From here I witnessed the foreign “invasion” mentioned above as well as the “wonder” that is the Grand Canyon.
The huge swatches and streams of red, gray, yellow, white and brown contrasted by the sun’s rays overwhelm visually. The sharpness of the granite edges awes you while its heights and depths intimidate. The sheer extent and diverse eminences of the landscape in front of you, at first glance, takes your breath away. It is, as the Park Service brochure rightly insists, humbling.
There appears to be no consensus list for the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, but, in the spirit of comparison, these are some of the serious contenders on anybody’s short list: the Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, New York’s Empire State Building, the Taj Mahal in northern India, the huge migration of animals on Africa’s Serengeti plain, the Great Wall of China, the unique wildlife prevalent on the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador, the ancient Incan fortress of Machu Picchu in Peru’s Andes Mountains, the Panama Canal, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
However, the one sure thing to be on any actual list, by anyone’s honest estimation, is the Grand Canyon.
(Hey, maybe all those places on the above honor roll would make for a fun trip … Hmmmm …)

Now, as longtime Boston Herald columnist and erstwhile colleague Tim Horgan used to write, “Every schoolkid knows about” the Grand Canyon (or at least they should), so I won’t bore you with an abundance of boilerplate concerning it. But a quick and dirty summary is in order here (I didn’t get out the yardstick but, as usual, relied on the park handouts, information on various trail markers along with a couple of trips on the internet to form this condensed information):
Over several million years, the mighty Colorado River carved out a gorge in the southwestern desert. In some spots it is a mile deep. The gorge ranges from four to 18 miles wide, and is 217 miles long. The standard altitude is around 7,000 feet high, although in some spots, the North Rim is around or over 1,000 feet higher than the South Rim (with some mountains ranging much higher).
The North Rim and the South Rim are just about 10 miles apart, but it takes a drive of about 215 miles around the edge to see it from both vantage points. Temperatures can be in the 80s in the summer months, but go as low as 20 in wintertime.
The park has grown since being designated a national park 98 years ago and is now almost a million and a quarter acres in area.
Geologists and botanists have great interests in this canyon: due to the ongoing erosion it illustrates the geological events that shaped the planet’s upper crust and its plant life varies from subtropical at the bottom to sub-arctic near the top.
The ancient dwellings in the lower canyon show us, of course, that the Indians were here first. In fact, the Havasupai remain in a part of the canyon. The first European to visit was Spanish explorer García López de Cárdenas in 1540 and right after the Civil War, intrepid American John Wesley Powell and his party became the first to navigate the canyon by boat.

Visible from the Mather Point walkway are many granite landmarks, some with names such as the Tower of Ra, the Phantom Ranch, Isis Temple and the Bright Angel Canyon, which runs north-to-south across the top of the Grand Canyon. But, truth be told, I found that the best viewing area by far was the East Rim near the old stone watchtower. It offered the best look at the Colorado, busy still with its chore of wearing down the granite of the canyon, and also the best angle to visually delve into the inner canyon.
(One thing that puzzles me about the tourists hereabouts - and thereabouts, for that matter: Why do people use video cameras to photograph things that have not moved in eons? A still photo is just as good or better for that purpose and you are much more likely to get people to thumb through a couple of snapshots than sit down and watch your video. Nobody asked me, but I say, save the video for the kid’s birthday parties.)

On a short late February sojourn up to Naples, Fla. I got some personal advice about the Grand Canyon from one of my first cousins -- as my family likes to say, once removed -- Stitchie. An ardent camper and mountain hiker, Stitchie could moonlight as a circus strongman (and he’d fit right in under The Big Top) and has a very bizarre sense of humor. Very bright in an Aw, shucks! sort-of fashion, he says I’m the only one who calls him Stitchie; everyone else just calls him Stitch.
He and his wife, the equally humorous though less-ribald Shecky, had visited the canyon several years ago and he said that there was nothing else to do up here except sight-see and, so, you could get the same experience from just watching a movie about it. As usual, he was half-right (Sorry, Stitchie, I just couldn’t resist that one; and relax, I considered nicknaming you Twitchie!).
Determined now, after Stitchie’s admonition, to get a different perspective, I checked out my options. There were more than several: the shuttle buses (no way, I rode the bus for 25 years living in Cambridge and Boston); a Jeep tour (a snoozer, and nothing I couldn’t do already with a good map and the truck), a hike (four hours down; eight hours up, according to a German tourist with very sore feet that I had a brief chat with); a rafting trip (need two weeks on the river and reservations made last century); a tour down into the canyon atop a mule or a donkey or something (fill in your own jackass joke here); and, lastly, airplane or helicopter tours.
I decided to take wing – literally! Having flown in small planes with bush pilots in Alaska at least a half-dozen times as well as a couple of times around northern New England, I chose to try out a chopper flight for the first time.
From the brochures available, there appears to be eight companies who provide this service, some based here, others from as far away as Las Vegas. (Factor in the many small planes also flying sightseers from Grand Canyon Airport, and it can get crowded up there over the Great Crease.)
Armed with reservations made the day before, I drove to a nearby heliport and boarded a six-person copter with two couples and our pilot, Hans. In cramped quarters, but with pleasant company (although the fellow in the seat opposite me did find use for the barf bag as the flight was ending), I’ll never get a better view, unless I grow some wings.
The sensation of chopper flight was also different. It looks as if a copter is moving quite fast when you follow it from the ground, but, from the inside, it seems you just hover. Interesting feeling and, even with the short duration of the flight, it was well worth the $145 price tag.
And talk about a cash cow, this heliport was swamped with customers, its gift shop and snack counter jammed. This is no cottage industry; this is big business, generating, by my math, at least $145,000 in revenue each day for this one company! That’s over a million bucks a week, folks.
And that’s just flights, not counting the souvenirs and refreshments sold. The company I chose to fly with has 10 copters available to fly, five paying customers per flight at $145 a head, two flights per hour per chopper, 10 hours each day, seven days a week. When I asked one of the heliports’ workers for the simple stats, he was very forthcoming about the success of this venture: using a wavy hand motion to indicate flight, he said, “It’s like this all day, every day, 8-to-6. They come in, they go out, they come in, they go out …” Always full? He nodded, “Yep!”
While I’m on the subject of flight, the many, many black crows floating around up here are so heavy, I don’t know how they fly. What are they eating? They remind me of the seagulls barely hovering over the old bandstand across from Kelly’s Roast Beef on Revere Beach, just waiting for you to toss them a French fry.

The Grand Canyon offers a state-of-the-art Visitors Center at Mather Point. It has huge topographical models of areas accessible from the South Rim, broken down by viewing point, geological charts and interactive maps. The rangers are informative, their advice descriptive. Also in this plaza is a library and bookstore, gift shop and refreshment stand, along with a picnic area and rest rooms. Really well done. There is another such spot on the North Rim and a gift shop/bookstore in the ground floor of the old Watchtower on the East Rim. The park also offers camping for RVers as well as tenters at several spots within its confines. For more, click HERE .


The Good, The Bad & The Clever

The small town of Tusayan, just below the South Rim, has a few hotel complexes, a couple of absurdly expensive gas stations, some fast food joints, coffee shops and several actual sit-down restaurants. Across from an I-Max theater, constantly running a film about you know what, is a large general store. The very large RV Park in which I stayed was located directly behind that general store. There’s also a cyber café, thank goodness, as there are absolutely no cell phone signals up here.
One of the restaurants in town is called Spaghetti Western. Its polished wood paneling is covered with movie posters for a lot of my old favorites, Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, and of course, High Plains Drifter and the symphonic soundtracks from these types of movies provided the background music (for those of us who consider eating to be High Art, it was quite apropos).
The wait staff, a bunch of Mexican fellows dressed in jeans and work shirts, was wearing heavy-heeled cowboys boots and atop their heads, all wore different style cowboy hats. I couldn’t make out a word they were saying, but it sure looked like they were having a good time. The food was just so-so here, but, for those of you who dream of one day opening an Italian restaurant (and you know who you are), this general idea has, as they say, legs.

Stupid Human Tricks, Part III

Now, some might ask, Why camp in town when it was available in-park? My answer is, It just worked out that way. Next question would probably be, Didn’t you miss the nature available? My answer is, No! Why? One evening as I coming back from the general store at twilight, I was blocked from the trailer by four large elk, three of which had full racks. The elk were munching on the grass around it and the truck, and they were not going to be disturbed until they finished dinner. One aggressively mimicked my approaches to the trailer, defensively keeping me at a distance. Did get a few snapshots of them later though, soon as I could retrieve my camera from the trailer.

Coming right up ...

The trip north into Utah and later visits to two wonderful national parks there, Arches and Canyonlands.