Fletcher - The Man Who Walked Through Time: The Story of the First Trip Afoot Through the Grand Canyon

ALSO BY COLIN FLETCHER

The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher (1989)

The Complete Walker III (1984)

The Man from the Cave (1981)

The New Complete Walker (1974)

The Winds of Mara (1973)

The Complete Walker (1968)

The Thousand-Mile Summer (1964)

Vintage Books Edition, May 1989

Text copyright 1967 by Colin Fletcher

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., on January 15, 1968.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fletcher, Colin.
The man who walked through time.
1. Grand Canyon. I. Title.
[F788.F55 1972] 917.9132045 72-4082
ISBN 0-679-72306-4 (pbk.)
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5244-0

Map copyright 1989 by Claudia Carlson

v3.1

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. The hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.

EMERSON

A quarter of a century ago, when I made this journey, Grand Canyon was largely untraveled below its Rims. So I did certain things that at the time seemed legitimate. I lit occasional campfires, for example. I had three supply drops parachuted from lowflying aircraft. I killed a rattlesnake. I slept inside an Anasazi cliff dwelling.

I hope you will understand that because of todays heavy travel in the Canyon by backpackers and river-runners such acts would now be neither legitimate nor legal.

C.F.
1990

THE PLACE

I T WOULD probably be a good thing to look first at some hard, objective facts.

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado is a chasm that slices through the plateau country of northern Arizona like a gigantic and impossible desert crevasse. It is more than two hundred river-miles long. At its center it is over a mile deep: if you built four Empire State Buildings in it, one on top of the other, they would not rise level with the Rim. The Canyon averages ten miles across, but some of its bays swing back for twenty, thirty, even forty miles. In all it covers more than one thousand square miles. But the vast bulk of this area is almost never visited. Even today, unexplored corners remain.

The story of how the Canyon came into being is quite simple.

A long time agofor the moment, let us call it seven million years agothe Colorado River meandered across a plain. Then a huge dome began to push up, very slowly, in the rivers path. As the dome rose, an inch a century perhaps, the river cut down into it. That is all. No sudden cataclysm. Just an immensely

It is easy enough, of course, to grasp this story with your intellect. The difficulty comes when you try to accept its reality with your whole being, as completely as you accept that a very old man has lived for almost a century. And in the Canyon even this acceptance is only a beginning.

Most of us, when we first think deeply about such time spans, tend to draw back in fear from their brink, just as we tend at first to draw back in fear from the brink of anything so immense as Grand Canyon. But it is worth remembering, I think, that some element of fear probably lies at the root of every substantial challenge. And it makes no difference at all whether the challenge is to your mind or to your body, or whetherwith richer promise than either, aloneit embraces both.

.

THE DREAM

I T HAPPENED quite unexpectedly, the way the big moments often do. A friend and I were driving from New York to the West Coast in early June, and we had detoured north from US 66 for a hurried look at Grand Canyon. It was midmorning when we parked the car and walked across asphalt toward the Rim. I had seen my quota of photographs and paintings, of course, and thought I knew what to expect: an impressive view that no self-respecting tourist ought to miss.

Long before we came close, I saw the space. A huge, cleaving space that the photographs and paintings had done nothing to prepare me for. An impossible, breath-taking gap in the face of the earth. And up from this void shone a soft, luminous light.

We came to the lip of the Rim.

And there, defeating my senses, was the depth. The depth and the distances. Cliffs and buttes and hanging terraces, all sculptured on a scale beyond anything I had ever imagined. Colors neither red nor white nor pink nor purple but a fusion. And stamped across everything, the master pattern.

Even before I had accepted what I saw, I heard the silence; felt it, like something solid, face to face. A silence in which the squawk of a blue jay was sacrilege. A silence so profound that the whole colossal chaos of rock and space and color seemed to have sunk beneath it and to lie there cut off, timeless.

In that first moment of shock, with my mind already exploding beyond old boundaries, I knew that something had happened to the way I looked at things.

Oddly enough, I am no longer quite sure when the decision came. It was not, I know, during the first morning. But all afternoon I sat on the Rim and looked down into the burning and apparently waterless waste of rock. Looked more closely now at the master pattern that is the fabric of the Canyon. At the layered, sawtooth pattern that had leaped out at me, simple and striking, in that first moment of shock. I looked at its huge, alternating bands of cliff and hanging terrace that reach down, repeating but never repititious, from Rim almost to river. I looked east and west, as far as my eyes could strain, until cliff and terrace tapered away into hazy distances. It was mysterious and terribleand beckoning. And some time during the afternoon, as I sat on the brink of this strange new world, it came to me that if a route existed I would walk from one end of the Canyon to the other. Once the idea had crystallized, no hideously sensible doubts reared up to plague me. And I did not need such fragile props as reasons. The only question I asked myself was whether the project would turn out to be physically possible. Perhaps it is in this kind of simple certainty that most of the worlds ridiculous and wonderful dreams are born.