Into the abyss

Hiker walking past Vishnu
basement rock canyon walls

The bottom line is this -- the Phantom Ranch (see last prior post) remains beyond my reach.   I feel like Adam and Eve -- barred from Paradise by an angel with a flaming sword.

I arrived at the Grand Canyon's South Rim on Friday afternoon, greeted by light snow showers that, by Saturday, had become heavy snow showers.  Very similar to my arrival and first full day in April 2012.  And the forecast was for minimal precipitation on Sunday, with perhaps a ten degree warming trend.

Conditions sounded ideal for a repeat of my 2012 hike to the river with -- perhaps -- the opportunity for an additional push onward to the ranch.

But in 2012, I began my descent on the Bright Angel trail bundled up and carefully avoiding slips on ice for the first mile or so going down into the canyon.  On Sunday this year, it was already shirtsleeve weather at the top when I began hiking at about 7:50 a.m.  I reached Indian Garden -- three  thousand feet below the rim -- at 10 a.m.  The old-fashioned dial thermometer that the National Park Service thoughtfully provides, hanging on a tree, showed that it was already 70 degrees.  I still had another 3.5 miles (and 1,300 feet elevation) to the river, and another 1.5 miles beyond that to the ranch.  A mule tender predicted that temperatures would reach the upper 80s by afternoon at the river. 

In 2012, by the time I reached the river, it had been only 70 degrees.

It was a tough decision, because Indian Garden itself felt very comfortable, and I felt very good following the descent.  But the probable increase in temperature bothered me, and I (chickened out) (made the prudent decision) (choose one), and decided to descend no further.  If I'm ever to make the round trip to Phantom Ranch in a day, I'll have to do it earlier in the year, departing from the top in freezing morning temperatures.

As a consolation prize, I made the three-mile round trip out to Plateau Point, a nice view point with an excellent view of the boiling Colorado -- gazing down at the river as it churned about, taunting me, 1,300 feet below.

Indian Garden is a bit of an oasis -- a woodsy area with surface water (at this time of year), resting on an impermeable layer of "Bright Angel shale" that keeps the water from soaking away before plant roots can take advantage of it.  Below this last sedimentary level, the trail enters the "Inner Canyon."  The wide vistas about the canyon provided until that point -- and that figure so prominently in photographs of the Grand Canyon -- give way to steep walled, narrow canyons of dark, extremely hard, metamorphic rock.

Beyond the siren call of Phantom Ranch, it's this geology of the lower portion that attracts me.  Just past Indian Garden, the trail passes what is called -- without hyperbole -- the Great Unconformity.  During the eons that layers of rock were laid down, there was a period when millions of years of sedimentary rock were gradually built up, and then eroded away all the way back down to the metamorphic "basement layer."  The present sedimentary layers that today rise to the rim were later deposited upon this re-exposed basement, leaving a gap of 1.2 billion years of  geological record totally erased -- or as the Park Service describes it, gone like pages torn out of a book.  The hiker can see where the lowest of the "newer" sedimentary layers lie directly on top of a metamorphic layer that predates the sedimentary layer by 1.2 billion years.

And -- being language-obsessed as I am -- it's perhaps the names given these basement layers, as much as their interesting geological development, that captivates me:  Vishnu schist, Brahma schist, Zoroaster granite, Rama schist, and -- most ancient of all - Elves Chasm gneiss.  To a non-Hindu, at least, these are rather dark and forbidding names, calling forth thoughts of ancient legends of war and cruelty, and applied in the Grand Canyon to the darkest and most ancient of primeval stone and rock.

In 2012, I found it impressive to walk through narrow canyons of this material -- stone forged under great heat and pressure through countless eons, back before the smallest one-celled life forms first began questioning their place in the Universe.  It was like being present at the beginning of time -- a far more potent experience than simply studying examples of these rocks in a museum or along the National Park Service's (excellent) park walk displays.

Emerging from amongst those walls of Vishnu schist into the warm and welcoming arms of the Phantom Ranch, with its warm beds, steak dinners, and happy, laughing guests, would be like experiencing the emergence of intelligent human life fully-formed from the stuff of lifeless stardust.  Or so I like to think. And babble about.

I'll give 'er another try, maybe next year.