Grand Ambitions
...continued.
My route rose through crisp green Juniper forest and meadows stained brown by the unfolding of winter. It was three hours before I encountered the park boundary again.
The road ended near a low lying sandstone escarpment. Juniper trees reached out, twisted and weathered, from cracks and crevices created by centuries of freezing and thawing. With caution and trepidation I approached a row of rock slabs the size of Cadillacs. A chasm opened before me. Across, less than a quarter of a mile distant, stood the South Rim, level and bare at spots, at others rising gently to blue mesas. Three thousand feet below lay the Colorado River, green and straight, bound by a precipice of red and brown from which it would never escape. I reached for a boulder to steady my vertigo.
Soon the shadows climbed the walls, crept upon the highest plateaus, and extinguished the fiery gold that the sun had cast upon them. A moon, full and white, rose to paint the shadows in blue and purple and cover all that remained in a blanket of magenta. Sitting upon a sheet of stone sheared flat and worn smooth, I braced against a chill breeze. I cuddled a cup of hot tea and looked toward the Colorado echoing from the inky darkness of the canyon's depths.
In its wake, the river left a two-billion-year timeline that touched all horizons and threatened to crack the crust of the earth. Captured on those walls was the history of a mass of gas and earthy matter seized by the sun and shaped by wind, water and sand. Born of fiery hell, they watched entire species, many of which dominated its surface for millions of years, driven to extinction by glacial ice. The entirety of human existence was scarcely represented by six inches of rock. An eighth of an inch summed up the age of human civilization. For the Grand Canyon, it was not time enough to blink.
It sat waiting. Waiting for another dawn. Just one in billions.