Wayne, from the Grand Canyon:

The canyon follows a fault line where two vast chunks of North America came together (Niagara Falls is on another). The silt-laden Colorado River cut down through the fault like sandpaper through balsawood. Each layer on the canyon walls represents the bottom of an ancient ocean; when there was no ocean, and therefore no accumulation of sediment, there is no rock. This absence of rock is called a nonconformity. We are living in a nonconformity now, since the top of the canyon is a limestone slab that is already 230 million years old and has nothing on it but a tsunami of tourists with their requisite hotels and restaurants.

Once we have taken in what is there—the pale earthtones, pinks, greys, and siennas of the various strata; the play of light and shadow on the ledges; the trees gripping sheer rock faces with their gnarled roots; the distant specks that are birds (gulls? peregrines? condors?) riding thermals above the river—we slowly begin to appreciate what isn’t there. There is far more absent from the Grand Canyon than there is present. In fact, the Grand Canyon is one colossal absence, billions of cubic metres of sedimentary rock carved away almost overnight by that thin silvery trickle of water we see enlivening the canyon floor.

Indeed, it is a trickle compared to what it once was. In its heyday, when John Wesley Powell led the Powell Geographic Expedition down it in 1869, the Colorado River flowed through the canyon at the rate of 250,000 cubic feet of water per second. Powell found the rapids so treacherous that half his crew deserted after three months. The water, in Edward Abbey’s words, “flowed unchained and unchannelled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw.”

From our vantage point on the parapet, it doesn’t look like there’s much grinding and clacking going on. We walk along for a while, hardly taking our eyes off the canyon, watching the pinks turn to purples and the greys to black. Snow is still falling, but gently, as though someone has upended a great scenic snowglobe of the Grand Canyon and then righted it again. Eventually we come to an impressive, four-storey log structure with wings stretching out almost to the canyon’s rim. Through a row of lighted windows in the main building we see white-shirted waiters setting up tables in a huge dining room; through another window, an enormous Christmas tree soars to the top of an atrium. People wearing expensive sweaters sit casually about in the lobby, reading, talking quietly amongst themselves, sipping drinks. We have come to the El Tovar.

(excerpt from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe)