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The
Grand Canyon
...mule
dung, and another large hole in the ground
Arizona: May, 1997
My brief and tantalizing introduction to the Grand Canyon served to instill in me a desire to get to the bottom and stay there, plus a hatred of mules.
L and I decided that the only activity we had time for this trip was a short hike down some of Angel Trail —1.5 hours down and 2.5 hours back up. It was basically a trudge through several miles of hot mule dung, with breathsnatching moments of fermenting mule pee at certain points.
Our 3.5 miles downwards brought us only a little way down the canyon wall, as we were to realize when we looked down on our route from above, the following morning.
The views were OK, but our fellow tourists much more interesting. There were a large number of them, young and old. It was good to see so many people of advanced years, their wrinkled knees swathed in elastic bandages, leaning hard on their aluminium walking sticks, bravely staggering up the slope in the early stages of cardiac arrest.
There was a beautiful young lady in see-through shorts,there were two mini-skirted, giggling Japanese girls wearing boots with platform heels, and I fell instantly in love with a French lady whose little bum was encased in white lycra...
There were careless, laughing gaggles of women taking their time and enjoying themselves, and grim platoons of young men, thudding down the path in a mist of testosterone, determined that this would hurt.
There were those who refused to take any notice of the dozens of warning signs, and were wandering down without water, wearing sandals. There was a chatty English newspaper photographer, taking his time, practising for Kilimanjaro next year.
There were panting middle-aged gents with t-shirts sticking to their huge and perspiring bellies.
There was an elderly lady, walking gingerly down the trail, bent beneath a rucsac as big as herself.
I felt that, from the top, the Grand Canyon is perhaps too much of a good thing.
In the South Rim Village, we mixed grumpily with legions of tourists, just like us, driving around endlessly searching for parking places, tacky souvenirs and ice cream.
We jostled each other, elbow to elbow, at the view points, from which everyone's photographs of the haze and the sunsets will all look the same.
And compared with Canyon de Chelly, the Grand Canyon is too big to grasp, every view ending up looking seemingly the same.
I left determined to spend at least a couple of nights at the bottom, later in the year, to see some of this vastness from a different, and hopefully more meaningful, angle.
And avoid the mule dung...
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