Stephen Nash - Grand Canyon for sale: public lands versus private interests in the era of climate change

I hope that you will not... mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the Canyon. Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it.

Theodore Roosevelt

This faint old path isnt on the brochure map, but it leads to a fine perch just the same. Moving past the car choreography and selfie poses at the popular Desert View area near the eastern border of Grand Canyon National Park, I find my way on a late afternoon.

Crumbling pavers end in a trace that weaves through rabbitbrush and juniper and over to a suitable rock, right on the abyss. No glance out there yet. I dont want to risk vertigo until Im settled. Then, with a beer and a bag of salt peanuts, I can drift out over , a hundred centuries of human striving, and a timeless void.

Anywhere you pause along the countless miles of edge brings dizzying contrast. The infinitesimal meets the cosmic, as a cliff swallow careens against far-off rock and sky. The immediatecheck your footing on that limestone grit, theres a long fall pendingopens abruptly onto silent eons of cycle and revision. Another contrast: under a longer gaze the wild and timeless look of this panorama bears the lasting marks of recent human activity. They are the destinations of this book.

If you were to make your way along this edge with me, for example, your line of sight would sweep out across the immense Venus, Apollo, and Jupiter Temples; the striated vanes of the Cardenas and Escalante Buttes; and the Tanner side canyon with its own side canyons and their side canyons falling away below in a ragged regression. Across the main Canyon, out on the high North Rim, a horizon of cool evergreens beckons, albeit through ten miles of haze.