few years ago, my friend, the writer Ann Zwinger, was emerging more than a little bedraggled from the depths of the Canyon after a harrowing winter ascent in foul weather. The trail was the Bright Angel, which originates hard by the various establishments of Bright Angel Lodge, so not a few of the inevitable tourists gazed with much astonishment at the strange phantasm issuing from the nether mists and snows. As Ann tells it, one elegant and impeccably attired woman eventually approached her and asked: “Pardon me, but is there anything down there?”

Yes, Virginia, there is something down there, and it is putting flesh and spirit to that “something” that these letters are devoted.
As I see it, there are four ways to experience the Grand Canyon. The first and most common is to look at it from the rim. While hardly to be discounted—this is the only opportunity most people have, after all, and a magnificent one it is— still, this is a rather limited way. The Canyon is there, silent and remote, and you are here, in the noisy outer world of cars and telephones. There is a barrier. You are not in the Canyon, it is not in you. You have not crossed over.

The second way is from an airplane or helicopter. This is truly awe-inspiring; there you are, a pinpoint suspended over this cataclysmic ditch. But the experience is even more remote, because a smelly, noisy, vibrating contraption separates you from the ditch. The ditch is unreal and fleeting: it might as well be a photograph or a movie.

The third way is to toss all common sense overboard, join the ranks of the certifiably insane, and go downriver. Even a cursory glance at those of us who have inhabited the river for any length of time—guides, rangers, river types, scientists—shows that the insanity is real and enduring, a sort of holy madness. Once in the river's coils, the rest of the world never again looks the same. But even that experience has limits. You are tied to the river and the supplies it carries for you. And it carries you as well, in splendid dreamlike state, Cleopatra on the regal barge. You do not feel the Canyon with your toes, measure its obscure recesses pace by pace, foot by foot, stone by stone.

The fourth way—walking—is the most intimate and wide-ranging: detachment is hardly a problem. When, snail-like, you carry your house and the universe of your needs on your back, the umbilical cord is cut at last and traded for a state of complete intimacy and total freedom. You depend on nothing, you and the Canyon are conjoined here, at home, in the company of the ancient ones who viewed their world in a similarly earthy, sweaty, connected and clean way. What you can do is limited only by your skill and your strength. Only after reaching a substantial measure of this conjunction does a fifth way begin to creep into your bones. At times it emerges as: “This place is making me explode, I must relieve the pressure by writing, painting, photographing, making music, making love.” At other times, it is the way of curiosity and wonder. When did things happen, and how? How did the Canyon come to be? Are the hills eternal, or just a passing cloud? Has the River always worked as it does now? And the ancient people, how was it for them? Why did they leave? What about animals and plants, how do they fare when their world changes? And even, in the immortal words of a passenger on the River, just how thick are the Canyon walls anyway? This fifth way is the way of time, when the mind ranges over untold years, reconstructing in its eye, landscapes and events nearly unimaginable today, but all recorded in the now, which is the result of all that came before.

Reconstruction, then, is the business at hand. Reconstruction of the nearly two billion years since the time when, for the Canyon, history began. But first something needs be said. Much is known today about the history of the Colorado River, but much—perhaps most—is not. So we construct ideas about how things happened, visions that rhyme with what we know today. But tomorrow new things will be learned; the visions will change accordingly, accommodating the new. Knowledge is a process, not an object, always evolving, always refining, improving, approximating more and more closely the reality of what was. Change, then, is to be expected. But at any time, the vision proposed, the hypothesis advanced to explain what we see, must take into account and harmonize with the facts as we know them. A serious proposition cannot ignore what is known or what is reasonably argued just because it is more convenient to do so.

Dr. Ivo Lucchitta

This is the first in a series of “Letters from the Grand Canyon” by Ivo Lucchitta, that will appear in future issues of the bqr.