A week ago, I returned from my most recent visit to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I wrote a detailed account of my visit last Monday, and then -- in what I interpreted as an admonition from my Muse -- accidentally deleted my draft while doing final preparations for its publication.
Perhaps my Muse was right. What I did at the North Rim -- what it's possible to do at the North Rim -- was pretty well described in my July 2022 essay on the same subject. Except that I did less hiking this time because of a bum knee.
The South Rim is a vast stretch of well-developed National Park -- lodges, shops, camp grounds, museums -- everything that the tourist needs for a day's visit or for a week's visit. Even, since my last visit, bike rentals to cover by bicycle the network of small roads and trails that stretch along the rim and behind the rim. They even have a train running between the South Rim and Williams, Arizona -- a 2¼-hour ride I've never taken, but keep promising myself that I will.
Ninety percent of Grand Canyon visitors visit the South Rim without ever sampling the offerings of the North Rim. Understandably, because the drive between the two rims takes 4.5 hours.
But the North Rim has its own charms, often felt in terms of the absence of the tourist attractions of the South Rim. And of the hordes who visit the South Rim. The North Rim has one and only one lodge -- Grand Canyon Lodge. The lodge does not offer rooms, but is surrounded by a large number of rustic cabins, in several classes of size and amenities. As part of the lodge complex, it has an informal take-out type café (contrasting with the rather luxurious dining facilities inside the lodge itself), a "saloon," a park headquarters, and a small gift shop.
The South Rim has two trails leading down to the river bottom; the North Trail has one. The South Rim has a network of trails along the rim and in the country behind the rim. The North Rim's lodge is on a promontory protruding into the canyon, and is thus surrounded by canyon on three sides; the only trails provided are either short walks, or a few much longer and more serious trails leaving the road from the park entrance several miles before one reaches the lodge.
These differences create quite different experiences for the visitors to the two rims. The South Rim feels like a small but bustling town, crammed with tourists. The North Rim feels like a quiet resort.
Aside from the 220-mile road between the two rims, the only approach to the North Rim is through empty land, part of it Indian reservation, a long driving distance from the nearest "civilization." It is 264 miles from Las Vegas, the nearest commercial airport. It is 145 miles from St. George, Utah, the only place that feels like a small city between Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Once you're at the North Rim, you are reliant on whatever you've brought with you, or what you can purchase at National Park outlets.
Some tourists miss rubbing shoulders with fellow tourists. I don't. It's not that there aren't others at the lodge or at the campground to talk with -- but their company is in no way forced on you. Even when you're with a "crowd" of thirty or forty other visitors on the lodge's back deck overlooking the canyon, you find many or most of your fellow visitors simply staring straight ahead into the canyon, fixing its size and beauty in their memories, contemplating the inescapable evidence that our home, the Earth, has been around and in flux for millions upon millions of years. And that our human race has made an extremely last-minute arrival on the scene.
Not all North Rim visitors are philosophers, if course. But the decision to visit the North Rim, in place of or or in addition to the South Rim, is in itself somewhat self-selecting. You don't visit the North Rim just so you can stick a "Grand Canyon" sticker on your car. And I enjoy feeling that the people around me, however diverse -- and you hear many languages spoken by visitors from many countries -- are in some way similar to myself in the kind of experience they're seeking. I like the sense of relative isolation -- I say "relative"; this isn't a wilderness area -- and the feeling I achieve that the Canyon sits placidly before me, welcoming me, opening itself to my meditations, whatever those meditations may be. Of the passage of time, of the complexity of the earth's development and formation, and of the hypnotizing beauty of the canyon. And of how our human minds somehow interpret the naturally-created rock formations before us as "beauty," a beauty that raises our consciousness, however briefly, beyond the concerns of our daily lives.
And so, would I even think of visiting the South Rim? Sure. Probably the next time I visit the Grand Canyon. It doesn't offer an inferior experience from the North Rim. Just different.
