Up Top and Down Deep

The Grand Canyon must be seen to be believed. To most, that is an "oh, my God" moment. It isn't the longest, deepest or wildest canyon, coming in at #4 on some lists, but it's size, complexity and grandeur justify its name. It likely dates from about 5 million years ago, old by human standards, but barely a tick on the scale of the earth's history. During that tick our Colorado River has made it a slice 277 river miles long, from one quarter to 18 miles wide. It has 167 named rapids and about 225 side canyons. Its southern rim is about 1373 miles long and its northern rim is about 1384 miles long. It cuts into seven named plateaus or platforms. Its maximum depth is 6,000 ft. It's river drops 2,000 ft in elevation as it flows through it. Harvey Butchart found 12,000 miles of hikeable paths in it between Lee's Ferry and Pearce Ferry. Its layer cake structure shows scores of landscapes, dunes, rivers, oceans, settled into a low interior basin over 1.8 billion years and then raised over 7,000 ft to its current elevation. It has been land on the move. Its river has carved deep and wide, producing many textures and colors, angles, towers, slopes, canyons and platforms. It is a place of magnificent overload.

Native peoples were the first to see, feel and hear it, to stand on its edge and to walk its center, starting some 13,000 years ago. It was Piapaxa 'uipi (Big River Canyon) to the southern Paiute, Öngtupka (Salt Canyon) to the Hopi, Chic-a-mi-mi Hackataia to the Havasupai, Tsékooh Hatsoh (Big Space Canyon) to the Navajo, or the work of Pack-i-tha-a-wi to the Hualapai, long before it was a "barrier which nature had fixed" to the Spanish Garces (1776), the Big Cañon of the Colorado to Ives or the Great Unknown to Powell (1895).

Ancestral Puebloans, Southern Paiutes, Hualapai and Havasupai lived, farmed, collected plants, hunted and still recognize culturally human artifacts and natural elements along the banks of the Colorado River. The Hopi people connect their origin story to the Sipapuni, where they climbed up a reed into the fourth world near the confluence of the Colorado and the Little Colorado Rivers. The Zuni people arose from Chimik'yana'kya, near Ribbon Falls. The Canyon and its river have remained sacred to these peoples and their descendants, drawing them back  to celebrate their origins.

My experience with the canyon dates from my youth, 1958. A family vacation put us on the south rim, my brother and I sitting near the edge and father pointing his new Voigtländer camera  (a unit that I still use) into the depths. ñon. This story and the images I share are a part of the legacy.

On The Road

Way Down

I've found ways to continue this family legacy, on the rims, on the interior trails, and on the plateaus that bound the Canyon. This story and the images I share are a part of this legacy.

Clarence Dutton, an early geological explorer of the Colorado Plateau and the father of "The Grand Staircase", described the Canyon this way:

"Whenever we reach the Grand Cañon in the Kaibab it bursts upon the vision in a moment. Seldom is any warning given that we are near the brink. At the Toroweap it is quite otherwise. There we are notified that we are near it a day before we reach it. As the final march to that portion of the chasm is made the scene gradually develops, growing by insensible degrees more grand until at last we stand upon the brink of the inner gorge, where all is before us. In the Kaibab the forest reaches to the sharp edge of the cliff and the pine trees shed their cones into the fathomless depths below." (Clarence Dutton, 1882)

Let's go to the Canyon. First, join me as we drive along East Rim Drive, on Dutton's "Kaibab". We will park along an unpaved fire road, load up our gear and walk to a trailhead, about a half-mile away along the paved road, surrounded by forest. The trailhead is unmarked, recognizable mostly to acolytes actively seeking it. Heading slightly down through low pines and oak, we step down over rock steps, around corners, on red dirt. We can see patches of sky above us through the trees. Then the sky appears ahead of us, down to  a rock edge some distance away. The trees stop. We are looking down into the chasm that is Grand, the Grand Canyon.

The edge has arrived suddenly, as Dutton predicted it would.

Now join me as we drive a 61 mile dirt road toward the North Rim's Toroweap. It is lined with sharp rocks, washboardy and dusty. There are a few trees, mainly accents, but mostly low shrubs that spread across dark volcanic bluffs. In the distance we can see peaks, cliffs and some narrow mesas. The land is open and the sky is big. As the end of the road we reach a broad platform with shallow indentations, water pockets. Out there is another part of the Canyon, its chasm beckoning us to approach.

Regardless of how I have approached it, I've been stunned by the seemingly infinite space and bounding earth of the Canyon, two pieces, one whole, like standing on the edge between ocean and earth.

"I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray,

                    the established sea-marks,

            felt behind me

Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent,
                    before me the

            mass and doubled stretch of water"
(Robinson Jeffers, Continents End)

See The River?

Down

Tipping off from the Kaibab, our way down will be the New Hance Trail, an unmarked, unmaintained route seemingly straight down. The guidebooks are cautious about it and seem to say "use it if you must". It's a trail for those in a hurry to get down. It the quickest drop of all the south rim trails, dropping 4,500 ft in just under 7 miles.   On the way our feet and lands touch ancient lands and their relics of life, smooth, rough, strong or crumbly. It's a individual struggle to prove yourself by surviving all the way to the bottom.

The trail was intended for mules, built by "Captain" John Hance to work his asbestos mine on the side of the river and later to take tourists to the bottom. It takes our boots down through boulders and crumbled shale, across steep faces with ball-bearing pebbles under foot and then forces us to slide down limestone faces into the aptly named Red Canyon before boulder-hopping to respite in the dunes of Hance Rapids.

Looking back up to the start, I sink into my own reverie. It seems like I've been in a fight. After hours of slipping, sliding and stumbling, the end feels, finally, like something magic has happened: I made it. It feels like I finally landed one good punch, maybe a perfect right cross. The soft dunes and the roar of the river across Hance Rapids are rewards for the challenges endured. They refresh before we move on, toward a return to the rest of what's dear.

Above The Deep River

At Toroweap the rewards are different, the result of having successfully negotiated the long, challenging dirt entrance path.

The bottom, the river, is 3,000 ft below us, not directly accessible. If we're lucky, we'll see a boat or two bobbing down the river, after 175 miles of transit. We are on top, imagining their lengthy ride, and wondering if they can see us, the mighty rim ants, as we stare down at them. We can only imagine the fight they've enjoyed to get to this point in their journey.

The Canyon is best known for space, steepness and struggle. But it isn't just about big and deep. It is also about adjacencies, lands filled with little victories, with tall trees, with scrubby plants and tough critters hanging tenaciously to hard rocks in hard climates and wandering through ancient forests, and with little pockets of water retained as long as possible. It is about fires and wind that sweep through and clear the way for new life. It is about people returning to their sacred roots, about people trying to scratch out a living from the hardscrabble earth, about colorful folks telling tales that bemuse visitors and about buildings sculpted from the earth on which they sit, looking down stunning side canyons. It is a place big enough for everyone to find their remembrances and their own reasons to return.

I admit to feeling presumptuous for this brief piece and the images that follow. There are many vantages from which to appreciate the Grand Canyon, not all precipitous. I am sharing some of them in gallery below. There are more that I haven't seen or have seen and haven't adequately recorded. There are many people who know more, have seen more and have captured more in images, words and traditions. I heartily recommend that you visit them if you want to see a more complete story. Their vision has created footsteps for us to follow.

Please enjoy these words and images as a first offering:

Please enjoy this place and these images. Come back and read the rest. You'll like it.

Welcome To The Gallery

Grand Canyon 

Starting places:

Pyne, How The Canyon Became Grand

Abbott & Cook, Hiking the Grand Canyon's Geology

Adkison, Hiking Grand Canyon National Park

Banks & Childs, Grand Canyon Stories: Then and Now

Butchart, Grand Canyon Treks: 12,000 Miles Through the Grand Canyon

Coder, An Introduction to Grand Canyon Prehistory

Crumbo, A River Runner's Guide to the History of the Grand Canyon

Ladd & Childs, Grand Canyon: Time Below the Rim

McGarry, Bruce Aiken's Grand Canyon

McNamee, Grand Canyon Place Names

Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons

Ranney, Carving Grand Canyon

Trimble, Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography

Onto The Sunset

My boots dig into the snowy slope as I descend to

Tough Life

the knobby rocks. They are black with holes in them as if bubbles had formed and then popped, leaving prickly surfaces. Their surface is irregular, with passages, large and small, disappearing into a darkness like that of a moonless night. The rocks grab my glove as I steady a hand on them and 

would shred my boot's sole if I walked very far out there. Black pebbles and gravel that look like they could have been unmelted hail are spread everywhere. This is malpais territory.

Flowed Rock

Rugged imports from another place, the rocks are material taken down from some distant location, pulled toward the earth's core, melted, and then pushed back through the crust in molten columns, destined to reach the surface and then flow like warm molasses across this place or be blown into the air and solidified into cinders. This is magma, basaltic lava, igneous, born of fire. 

Poking up from the rocks and the cinders are trees, Ponderosa Pines and Aspens, some regal and some stunted, wispy strands of Apache Plume, and other shorter survivors. In Bonito Park Yellow Sunflowers adorn the meadows. Near here the bright petals of the unique Sunset Crater Penstemon defy the cinders. Birds flit among the rocks and plants.

Behind me is a large cone, Sunset Crater, rising a thousand feet. Unlike the lava flow, its surface is smoother, like a giant pebbly dune. Its nearly symmetrical shape looks like an upside-down funnel. It is a cinder cone, the result of a hole in the earth's crust and the source of the prickly surface in front of me. To my side I see a smaller layered version of the cone, tipping yet holding its shape because the layers seem glued to each other. 

This rugged landscape looks inert. But the bold wind flowing through the trees reminds me that it not so. And seeing all this material, basalt, cinders, snow, trees, plants, that emerged to blanket the scene shows the dynamic beauty that our earth gifts to us when we really look. It is boldly wearing its game face.

What is all of this otherworldly stuff? Welcome to the San Francisco Volcanic Field, an 1,800 sq mi area with at least 600 cinder cones and at least two volcanoes within its bounds, ranging in age from six million years to nine hundred years. Sunset Crater, named because of the red, pink, and yellow shades seen at its crest, the colors of the sunset, rises up to 8,300 ft just 15 miles northeast of Flagstaff. It is in the shadow of its older and larger sibling, the San Francisco stratovolcano, once cresting at over 15,000 ft, and, having erupted like Mt. St. Helens, is now seen as the San Francisco Peaks, the highest point of Arizona at 12,600 ft. 

These peaks are named by at least ten Native American peoples, including Navajo, Apache, Acoma,

Sacred Peaks

Southern Paiute, Havasupai, Hualapai, Yavapai, Zuni and Hopi, who will appear again later in this post. These names arise from the power the peaks provide to bring life-giving moisture. 

Sunset Crater is a part of this field, the result of a complex eruption occurring about 900 years ago and

Sunset

lasting about a century. It started with a six mile fissure oriented northeast that spewed magma, eventually covering 800 sq mi with magma and cinders. Sunset Crater is at the northeast terminus, standing 1,000 ft above its surroundings with a base a mile wide. It is one of ten cinder cones and numerous other surface structures along the fissure. This country is crowded.

If we could leave the ground and fly with the ravens that flourish here, we would see the bigger story. We would know that Sunset Crater is more than beautiful cinder cones. It has also produced two flows, one to the northwest, the Bonito Lava Flow, where I've been standing, and one to the east, the Kana-a, that flows toward the land of Hopi. The Bonito Flow had at least three stages. In each one the lava flowed and the cone was altered, the top perhaps slipping intact into the lava and being rafted away. But then cinders re-emerged and the cone was repaired. These cinders are found in each of the Bonito flows. Nearly one billion tons of material emerged from this eruption sequence.

Sunset Crater is now quiet and seems ancient and stable. Stable it is, but ancient it is not. The eruptions took place about 900 years ago. But the platform on which this magma flowed and cinders landed was formed in a large ocean 250 million years ago. And less than 100 road miles away is the bottom of the Inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, formed 1.4 billion years ago. Old, yes, but certainly not ancient, not by earth standards. It is one of the newest landscapes on the Colorado Plateau.

This pattern of eruption is still happening. In Mexico, in the 1940s, a similar cinder cone and associated lava

flow appeared, as the "volcano in the cornfield". A farmer, Dionisio Pulido, was preparing his fields for spring

Birth

sowing outside his Michoacán village of Paracutin when he noticed large crack, over six feet wide and 150 feet long. As he continued to work, he heard thunder and felt an earthquake.

Cornfield Volcano

He was terrified for himself and his family. He was concerned about the safety of his family. As he searched for and found them, the crack became a six foot hill and the Paracutin volcano was born. In nine years the cone rose to nearly 1.400 feet above the original field and destroy the town. It was the first time that scientists have been able to observe a volcano from birth through extinction. See the details

That's how a modern witness reacted and saw. Now let's leave the present and go back to the origins of Sunset Crater. There were humans who witnessed these events. Surveys have found pit houses buried by cinders and lava flows as well as magma molded around corn cobs. Sunset Crater was another volcano in a cornfield, but to the Sinagua and the Hopi peoples. And there is some evidence that the appearance of Sunset Crater made the population around the time of the eruption increase. Fascination with power? Fertility?

We don't have any contact with the Sinagua people. But we do have contact with the Hopi, a group that traded and shared space with them.  Remember the Kana-a flow to the east? Following it takes us along its six mile flow and toward a legend still alive in the Hopi village of Mishongnovi, just 65 miles away. This village was present during the events of Sunset Crater and it is the subject of a legend of the "earth fire" that tells of a direct connection between eruption and the village. It is a morality tale of bounty, treachery, defiance, punishment, forgiveness, and reward. 

There was a time when a young man, Ka'naskatsina, came from the San Francisco Peaks, the home of the Katsinas, and took a wife from Mishongnovi. Things went well until some villagers became cranky and tricked the wife to betray her husband. He then left the village, returned to his village and sought a just punishment.

His elders suggested that he build a large fire to show his anger, a fire that could be seen from Mishongpovi and cause them to seek forgiveness. He did so, but the fire pit he dug was too deep and his fire brought up more fire, from below. Then the situation worsened and magma started erupting and heading east. This was the Kana-a flow. It got so bad that it threatened the safety of Mishongpovi. He didn't want the village destroyed, just chastised, so he summoned the wind that lived in a cavern within the Bonito flow and asked that the fire be prevented from reaching the village. Mishongpovi was saved.

The villagers felt bad but the betrayers were still defiant. So the Katsinas denied rain to the village for several years. Hardship and death followed. All of the betrayers eventually died. The Katsina then took pity and forgave the remaining villagers, returning their abundance. 

Then and now Sunset Crater is a place of wonder and refreshment. The rocks, plants, wildlife and wind remind us how powerful and vibrant the earth can be, even in places that seem hostile. The stories remind us that this landscape is a homeplace. The earth is still more than a resource to be used and discarded. It is our home. If we misuse it or the life it provides to us, will pay a steep price. We can only push around for so long before it pushes back, much harder.

Please enjoy this place and these images.

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Sunset Crater 

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To The Cliffs

My truck bounces as it climbs to the approaching summit, gripping the wavy surface of the road as the asphalt seems intent on throwing me. The earth around me looks tipped and convulsed. The highway travels over flat sheets of red and tan sloping down under the road and on to a large wash, disappearing under the near side of the wash. The far side is bordered by large blocks, layered with reds, rotated so that the layers point back to the left, over the road, as if to say, "up there", toward a cliff that doesn't exist up there any more. More layers of southwestern colors, siblings of the fallen blocks, rise above them. These layers consist of slopes, bouldery, interrupted by vertical faces, rough and blocky. The crest is serrated. These are the Echo Cliffs.

Beyond the summit the view opens toward a wide yellow plain, the Marble Platform, running to the west and the south. Its surface is cut by a winding shadowy canyon, the bottom out of sight. This is the Marble Canyon part of a Colorado River river trip. "Colorado" means "red-colored" in Spanish. It used to be mostly red ("Colorado" is "red-colored" in Spanish) because it was a voracious consumer of southwestern red earth as it dug its way south through the Colorado Plateau to the Gulf of Mexi

co.  Across Marble Canyon a broad scarp abruptly rises from the platform and obliquely runs toward the distant end of the Echo Cliffs, forming a narrow canyon. These the Vermilion Cliffs.

Platform, Cliffs, From the West

These Cliffs are a part of the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, a nearly 300,000 acre National Monument that includes the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, the magnificent cliffs and the top of it all, the Paria Plateau. Together they form a little known patch of southwestern splendor. It is a place that draws me back again and again.

The Monument is a section of a larger Vermilion Cliffs geological structure, a part of the famed Grand Staircase consisting of multiple steps, the Chocolate, Vermilion, White, Grey, and Pink Cliffs, that start at the Grand Canyon and climb up to Bryce Canyon. The staircase Vermilion Cliffs are much longer than just the Monument, starting at the Colorado River and traveling toward Zion and including the Monument along the way.

The cliffs form an irregular horseshoe or a tipped Minnesota, with abrupt and sheer edges on the east side near the Colorado River, curving sharply around to the west and then shallowing. Roads surround much of the Monument, keeping the cliffs above much of the way. Carving through the middle is the Paria River, a muddy, quicksandy route that starts below Bryce Canyon, enters the plateau from the north and ends at the Colorado River. It is abetted by the Buckskin Gulch, a normally dry but flash-fillable slot that enters from the west and joins the Paria River in its narrows.

Wherever you see them, the Vermilion Cliffs beckon and challenge. From a distance, they make you look, rising sharply from a flat plain. Up close, they are humbling, rising above and in front of you in a tumble of remnants, debris, slope and cliff portions in many shades of red, topped by a thick layer of white. Their face is often rough, giving up to erosion mostly in blocks large and small. Their vertical sections poke out like resolute chins defying their fate. Small canyons have been clawed back from the face. Their crest and some of the canyons are dotted by the green of juniper trees. They collect water and then share it slowly.

Their outside faces may be rough, but their interior faces are smooth. The west end of the Monument is the locale of Coyote Buttes, home to The Wave, a piece of a sandstone wave stuck in mid-break, and to the cliffs of Paria Canyon, sandstone piled high and then sliced through like with a hot knife. These textured layerings of weathered and flooded sandstone take your breath away. Walking up and placing your hands at the bottom of 200 million year old fossilized dunes and river sands is a rare opportunity to feel our earth.

Marble Canyon at Navajo Bridge

A good first view of the cliffs is to drive down Highway 89A, across Navajo Bridge, to Lee's Ferry. It's where John Wesley Powell

Colorado River, Headed to Marble Canyon

encamped, where Jacob Hamblin explored for a river crossing passage, where John D. Lee built his crossing passage and one of his homes, Lonely Dell, where the Spanish, Dominguez and Escalante, tried to cross on their search for a route from Santa Fe to California and where the Paria River allows access through the plateau for the earliest travelers. There are relics of these activities that can be seen from this starting point.

We can thank native peoples for the name Vermilion Cliffs. The southern Paiute were residents for 600 years before Europeans arrived. Their name was Un-kar Mu-kwan-Mu-kwan-I-kunt, meaning Vermilion Cliffs. Powell translated it and stuck it to the maps. "Paria" is also Paiute, and may mean water that tastes salty.

You can see and appreciate the Vermilion Cliffs from the highways, but to feel them you must get out and walk. I've done so, into Coyote Buttes, Paria Canyon, Buckskin Gulch and the lower Paria River. I've hiked to the bottom of the cliffs, felt their towering presence and seen the hardscrabble ranch buildings that still hang on to life. I've looked down and seen sand, everywhere. I've looked up and seen the clear bright skies. I've looked around and seen little water. I've put on the sunscreen and packed in the water. I'll do it again.

When you walk about, start by exploring the exit of the Paria from its canyon, walking past Lee's Lonely Dell, smelling the fragrant sage, wading or hopping past goosenecks and through deep drifts of ancient sands. Then come back and climb the Spencer Trail to get a birds eye view of the river. If you are daring, find the Escalante Trail and follow it back to the Paria River, Lonely Dell, and your cooler of drinks.

Driving west along Highway 89A, look for the places you can get past fences get yourself up to the canyons, washes, promontories, piles , buttes and boulders that make up the southern edge. You are near the Old Spanish Trail that linked Santa Fe, New Mexico and Southern California.

Cliffs

Be sure to climb far enough to look down toward the Marble Platform (and toward the Kaibab Plateau,  another story).

Leftover Piles

Drive as far as you can and hike the rest to the old Lee/Hamblin homestead, Bar Z, that used water from a spring at the base of the cliffs.

Turn north on House Rock Valley Road (a 4-wheel-drive road not passable if wet), a passageway between the Monument and the Kaibab Plateau. Stop at the Condor release viewing site, high on the cliffs, being used to restore California Condors to the Grand Canyon region.

Up the Sandy Road

Note the roads running to the east, up toward the plateau. Very sandy, use caution. You'll also pass near an Ancestral Puebloan site, West Bench Pueblo, dating from about 1200 A.D.








Stop at the sweet spots, access points to the Coyote Buttes, showplace for sculpted sandstone, the Wave,

The Wave

the White Pocket and the upper Buckskin Wash. You will need permits, sometimes difficult to obtain. Hiking can be hard and driving is a sandy challenge back there. 

Continue north, then go east on Highway 89. Soon you'll drop into the valley of the Paria River and the road to White House Trailhead. It will seem overrated given the volume of water, dense brownish greenish sludge that gives little visibility of the bed and likes to eat loose footwear, it carries. (This is the southwest where aridity can make modest water, or even the memory of it, grandiose.) Then again, sometimes it gets way more dramatic.

Hiking Down Canyon

Muddy Water

White House is where you start a journey into the Paria Canyon Wilderness,
a forty mile four day trek, through the heart of the Monument to Lee's Ferry, featuring narrow canyons, river-slogging with quick sand, rock art, arches, and more. (You can also "dive" the rockfalls of the Buckskin joining the canyon in the narrows. Much harder.)

Buckskin: Sandy Shelf and Wall

Heading toward Page, you are looking at the north side of the plateau and the spectacular cliffs are absent. The climb to the top is longer but flatter and easier.

Continuing through Page and then south, there are glimpses of the Cliffs, the plateau and the broad portal of Paria Canyon's channel to the Colorado River. Driving back to Lee's Ferry completes the loop.

Now you have driven around these red walls, walked a bit and read the visitor center histories. Questions remain. Why are the cliffs here and how were they formed? The first answer is tied to pieces of the landscape that you've already seen, the Colorado River and the Echo Cliffs. This land was part of a broad basin that had many layers underlying the surface, some softer and sandy and others harder. At some point, the river started running down through it, using the elevation drop and its sediment to claw its way down, down, down. From above, storms brought water, snow, ice and rain to weaken, fill and split, to erode. The river sank, exposing new layers along its banks and the water ate into those layers. The softer layers near the top gave way, widening the canyon, and leaving piles of rubble at the bottom. Then the river sank into harder layers of limestone. The storms couldn't penetrate the harder layers as quickly, so softer layers continued to recede and the platform was unveiled. The cliffs, Vermilion and Echo, and the platform, Marble, came into being and are still changing. Our earth is a restless place. The cliffs continue to move and the river continues down. The action is moving toward the northeast. If you come back in the future, say in tens of million of years, they will have receded further, may have disappeared, the canyon will likely be wider and the platform larger.

Why "vermilion"? Southwestern earth contains abundant iron, sulfur and manganese, gypsum, red, yellow, blue, white all of them defining colors in the cliffs. It is often barren of vegetation, so the soil colors are often visible. Hence the visible vibrant colors. These colors and their shades will change over time. Early morning and mid-day will give different sights. Wet cliffs will look different than dry ones. Stick around and you'll see all the colors.

Why "Cliffs"? First answer: lots of time and dirt. The earth you see has been created in many different landscapes, oceans, rivers, lakes, dunes, and dunes. The land at the bottom of the cliffs formed under a western ocean landscape 350 million years ago, depositing hard limestone and leaving little sea creature shells embedded in those deposits. Much of the earth above the limestone came from high areas to the south and the east and was carried in large rivers. At times the land was wet and verdant. The top white layer, the dunes on the Navajo Sandstone formed when the landscape turned dry and when dinosaurs were in the middle of their 160 million year run. But the story doesn't stop there. Remember the Grand Staircase? You are not at the top of it here. This earth continued to change, more landscapes were created, burying the earlier materials, filling them with more colors, pushing down, compressing, hardening. These upper layers are gone now, moved elsewhere by the forces of erosion. What is left is battle-hardened, slow to give and resolute.

Second answer: dry climate. The Colorado Plateau is an arid place, west of Powell's Hundredth Meridian. Some climates are wet and erosion marches like an army. A dry climate turns erosion into a slow motion walk. Still relentless, it simply takes longer here. We're lucky to have this window.

These sublime cliffs are ours to see, smell and feel. They don't get the amount of traffic as their neighbors, Grand Canyon and the parks of southern Utah. So we can still have a quiet walk, a creatively challenging hike or even quietly tranquil contemplation. Please enjoy this place and these images.

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Vermillion Cliffs 

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