Why the Grand Canyon is Meant to be Admired from Afar

In July 2009, Bryce Lee Gillies of McLean, Virginia, a physics student at Arizona State University, decided to celebrate his 20th birthday by hiking solo in the Grand Canyon.

The 5' 3", 130-pound young man decided to traverse the most stunningly beautiful loop from the North Rim down to Surprise Valley.  All his attempts to find a friend to hike with him had failed so he decided to go alone.

He parked his Subaru at the Bill Hall Trailhead and hiked without sufficient water and experience for an entire week. After getting lost, he collapsed on a boulder, face-down, dead from heatstroke and dehydration. By the time intense searches were launched and he was found, his body had turned black and bloated from the intense heat.

The 27.6-mile hike he attempted, which Backpacker Magazine had described, "This could very well be the toughest long weekend hike in Grand Canyon National Park, but you won't regret a single sunny mile," ended Gillies' life.

He typed on his Blackberry while he was dying, "Life is good whether it is long or short. I was fortunate to see more than most, and for that good fortune I am most thankful." He also typed that he believed in God but was not sure what the afterlife was like, "but I hope there is water."

He was glad that he had a Blackberry with him, otherwise it would have been hard to carve words in the rocks surrounding him, he typed. His final sentence was, "I feel like going into the wild is a calling all feel, some answer, and some die for."

One of the park rangers named Sueanne Kubicek was assigned the painful and difficult task of driving his white Subaru from the Bill Hall Trailhead and of gathering soil in a small bag, which his family had requested -- soil from where he had lived his last dream before taking his last breath.

When Sueanne opened the car door, inside was a plastic gallon jug of water, awaiting Gillies's return from the hike.

His death was among the 125 known and recorded deaths classified as "environmental." Many others who have died of environmental factors, i.e., heat stroke, dehydration, and hyponatremia (low salt in the blood due to overdrinking liquids) are not known nor recorded since the park opened in 1919. Five people were established to have died before the opening and their deaths were also included in the 125 fatalities due to environmental factors.

Thoughts on Hiking in the Grand Canyon

I am reading a book I purchased in Grand Canyon village, "Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon." Had I read this book before our visit, I would have NEVER gotten anywhere near the South Rim or North Rim for that matter.

I am so glad we did not choose to hike down on any trail! My adrenaline junkie husband did go down on two trails totally unprepared but not far, relatively speaking. He had a tough time climbing back, a really tough time. And he is not in the worst shape for his age. 

One of the lessons I learned from the wise and seasoned guide, Michael P. Ghiglieri, is that "canyoneering is not mountaineering." Hiking on flat ground, hiking on mountains, and hiking in canyons are quite different.

Hiking on flat ground is obvious unless you are hiking in the desert with shifting sands, sink holes, intense heat, rattlesnakes, scorpions, or alligator-infested swamps.

Speaking of scorpions, one of our guides, Derrick, told us that he rented a house cheaply in Phoenix and, upon moving in, he realized that the house, while empty, had been colonized by scorpions. He was in the process of trapping them and using up a lot of glue traps until he realized that scorpions are cannibals. So, he left the traps in place longer until they were quite full.

Hiking in the mountains you learn early on how unfit you are, and that realization weeds the unfit out in the early game and you can return to the staging area, your life is spared.

Hiking down into the Grand Canyon, the trail appears easy, the air may be cool, there is often a breeze, and you are making good time going down. Then the unfit and unprepared must hike back up.

Ghiglieri wrote that "it is often a hot, dry, hard, agonizing, and often torturous physiological contrast to the descent, the unfit get weeded out late in the game and get weeded out brutally. Sometimes fatally."

The levels of heat and thirst in the Grand Canyon are unforgiving. And in wintertime you can get buried alive and freeze to death from sudden snows. And you can get trapped in rock crevasses. And during the monsoon season you can drown from floods coming from miles away.

Ghiglieri wrote, ...."many of us hiking in Grand Canyon seem more like bizarre medical experiments tossed into an alien landscape of hostile, temperatures, desiccating winds, and fierce solar radiation to see how long we can walk before we collapse."

It is an alien landscape filled with sharp edges, huge boulders, crumbling rocks, slippery rocks, sheer cliffs, huge walls, desert climate, intense solar radiation, dry heat sucking all electrolytes out of your body, and danger at every turn.

If the Inner Canyon temperatures are as bad (and they are) as the temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona in 2017 when 155 construction workers died of heat stroke, it is a no-brainer to stay away from such dangerous hikes. 

Hundreds of hikers made it back safely while others died, and the ratio seems in favor of those who survived. Just because the pull of the wild and dangerous is there, should we answer yes, I am coming no matter what?

Be careful if you decide to hike solo or in a small group! Better yet, hire mules, hire guides, and go hiking in large groups. Stay together and do not deviate from the detailed map and carry plenty of food and especially water. Most people need two gallons per day, others more.

P.S. I am not sure now which subject I am going to have more nightmares about, hiking down into the Grand Canyon and running out of water, stranded on a trail with no escape, or sharks on the loose, swimming unseen and close to us in the ocean while the Jaws song is playing in my brain.

 

Meat Production Export and Emigration Visas

A farmer's potatoes for the winter

Living imprisoned inside the borders of a socialist republic run by the Communist Party was not easy – I know from personal experience. One had to get used to the many affronts to liberty and daily survival, including food and amenities the western world had taken for granted for decades and still do. Deep down most people wanted to flee, defect during a hard to obtain legal trip, or to disappear across the highly guarded border during the middle of the night.

Jewish citizens had more options; their freedoms could be bought with hard currency, the universally accepted (at the time) U.S. dollar. The currency was accepted by all because they had trust in the U.S. government. But faith and trust in the U.S. government is fading, in the same direction as the faith in the U.S. dollar.

Jewish emigration had one escape that the rest of the country did not have. Ceausescu used to say, according to Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from a communist country,” Oil, Jews, and Germans are our most important export commodities.” Ceausescu had mastered the art of milking money from the west, specifically Israel and West Germany.

A spy named Henry was the intermediary in a trade that involved paying a certain amount of U.S. dollars to the dear leader’s personal account for each Jew allowed to emigrate. According to Pacepa, Henry negotiated a deal whereby 500 Jewish families would be allowed to leave if an automated chicken plant were to be built free of charge at Peris. The communist president at the time was Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej and he approved the project as “a onetime experiment.”

The plant was built at Peris, a small village on the northern side of Bucharest. That property was owned by the Ministry of Interior, no doubt confiscated from villagers, plot by plot. The dear leader liked the plant and ordered five more built, making the Ministry of Interior the largest meat producer in the country by 1964. The packaged meat, transported by refrigerated Mercedes trucks, was delivered to the west in exchange for hard currency which the commies at the top pocketed, while the citizens starved and spent their days standing in endless lines to find bones for soup. We considered ourselves lucky if we found pork’s feet in the butcher shops.

What did the Ministry of Interior own that made it the largest meat producer? “Chicken farms, turkey farms, pig farms, which produced tens of thousands of animals per year, several cattle farms, and other farms with some 100,000 head of sheep – all with automated slaughterhouses, refrigerated storehouses, and packing plants.” (Lt. Gen. Pacepa, p. 73)

Pacepa wrote in his book, Red Horizons, that Henry paid for everything in exchange for exit visas for Romanian Jews. They could go wherever they wanted to emigrate to the west.

Political prisoners staffed the packing plants. Often among them they found engineers and veterinarians who were forced to work to maintain the dear leader cash-cow enterprises.

When someone complained that they needed more men-power to run the ever-increasing farms and packing plants, Gheorghiu-Dej is alleged to have said, “If you cannot find the people you need in the jails, just arrest the ones you need and then use them.” Find the men needed and then create the crimes to put them in jail to use as free labor.

The production of these enterprises, eggs, chicken, turkey, pork, beef and even cornflakes from a cornflakes factory, was earmarked for export to the west only while the population starved. We had no idea what cornflakes were since we never saw such products on our markets, and we did not eat cereal for breakfast. Our breakfasts consisted of rye bread with butter, if we were lucky enough to find it in the store, and linden tea.

By 1965, Pacepa wrote, “Romania was producing 50,000 Landrace pigs a year, all exported to the West as bacon and ham.” We never saw such ham and bacon in the proletariat’s stores.

The Landrace piglets had been smuggled out of Denmark in diplomatic automobiles and trucks. Landrace piglets were the result of selective breeding in Denmark. They were forbidding their export for breeding, but the commies always found ingenious ways to steal from others.

When Ceausescu came to power after Gheorghiu-Dej died, he found the scheme outrageous to swap food production and farm animals for Jewish visas, not from a humanitarian standpoint but from a financial gain point of view.

He produced a new plan to levy a cash amount for every Jewish visa, based on age, education, profession, type of employment, and family status. The amount could be anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 per person. Some people’s visa demand was $250,000.

Bolstered by the millions of dollars obtained from these visas, Ceausescu decided to sell such visas for ethnic Germans too; Romania had almost a million of them. The awful sale of Romanians of Jewish and German descent padded Ceausescu’s numerous foreign bank accounts with credits and his secret cash stashes with daily suitcases filled with dollars delivered by planes.

At some point Ceausescu decided that those given visas should also become secret agents. He ordered, “No Romanian citizen of Jewish or German descent, should be given an emigration visa unless he has signed a secret agreement with the security forces and has agreed to act as an intelligence agent abroad.” This unique type of tyranny has been emulated by other communist countries who allow their citizens to emigrate to the U.S.  They are loyal first to the country they left.

Who knew that animal husbandry, meat packing, and the sale of emigration visas could be so profitable to communist tyrants!

The Grand Canyon (Part III)

Two hours after we left Sedona in our rearview mirror, taking the 114-mile route through Williams on I-40 and Highway 64, we finally reached the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

We parked in the Grand Canyon Village (elevation 6,800 feet) and began exploring the various cabins and sites made famous since the official opening of the national park in 1919.

I was not planning to hike the easy 12.8-mile Rim Trail which skirts the edge of Grand Canyon between South Kaibab Trailhead and Hermits Rest. Taking this trail would have given any hiker the opportunity to pass by more than a dozen amazing and “jaw-dropping” viewpoints.

We stopped by the Yavapai Geology Museum and Verkamp’s Visitor Center which happened to be near our parking spot.

Nothing had prepared me for what I experienced when I first laid eyes on the majestic and enormous Grand Canyon - I was absolutely speechless, breathless, afraid that if I blinked, this magnificent otherworldly beauty before my dizzy eyes might disappear. I was choking with emotion, tearing up in amazement, and experiencing absolute joy to be alive in that moment.

It was unlike anything I had ever imagined it would be! Was it really all carved by the Colorado River and fractured into 600 tributary canyons? Was it part of the Biblical Flood? Was it once an ocean?  God’s creation, volcanic activity, hardened lava, the Colorado River, water erosion, and Ancient Aliens must have been busy to create this gigantic “hole in the ground” stretching for 277 miles.

The Canyon’s South Rim extends for 1,373 miles. The North Rim stretches 1,384 miles, a total of 2,757 miles of rim. If one was to build guardrails for it all, it would need to encircle the equivalent of half the planet, according to Michael P. Ghiglieri. 

Colorado River seen through 40x optical zoom

It looked like a strange spatial gorge filled with monoliths of unfriendly and sharp rocks rising out of the mantle of the earth like pyramids and impaling torture devices. The rusty, ochre, orange, pearl, and even violet hues gave the rocks the appearance of an immense dessert that was waiting to be carved for someone’s birthday.

The closer I got to the rim, the dizzier I got. I was grasping for support from branches of small juniper trees growing here and there. The feeling of immense permanence of these rocks vis-a-vis my fleeting and tiny existence in time was overwhelming.

I really felt that, if I blinked, the huge chasm would disappear and I would find myself sitting in my chair comfortably at home, daydreaming about climbing into a caldera in which the volcanic rock had cooled into magnificent shapes. Except these rocks were not all volcanic, and it was not a caldera.

My husband standing by 1,000-year-old juniper tree on the left

We are told by geologists that the Grand Canyon is a mile-deep gorge in northern Arizona which had formed about 6 million years ago when the Colorado River started to carve a channel through layers of sedimentary and other types of rocks.

Sunset on the South Rim

Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to make their way into this gorge in the 1540s. But humans have lived in the canyon since the last Ice Age. We have found evidence of such even though most of the Canyon has never been explored.

Since Cortez, and then the 26-year-old Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s exploration of the Canyon in the 1540s, the Spanish looked for the fabled seven cities of Cibola in search of gold but found nothing. Subsequent attempts to go down in the Grand Canyon such as Captain Mendosa, Juan Galeras, and one other man, also failed but they were at least able to go down one third of the way to the Red Wall Limestone cliff. That is when they realized that the tiny boulders, they saw from the rim were actually bigger than the 300-foot Tower of Seville. Trying to go down further looked like suicide so they turned back.

What miners found centuries later resulted in a sort of mineral rush by 1890: copper, uranium, arsenic, cobalt, nickel, molybdenum, zinc, lead, and silver. The quantities were never very large, and it was difficult to bring them out of the canyon.

Sunset on the South Rim

We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to President Benjamin Harrison who declared the Grand Canyon protected in 1893 as a forest reserve. It became an official U.S. National Park in 1919 for endless generations to visit and marvel at God’s creations.

Located northwest of Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon is over 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, and one mile deep, one-tenth the length of the continental U.S., containing the oldest exposed rock on Earth with a cross-section of the Earth’s crust dating back two billion years. What a magnificent opportunity for geologists to study evolution through time!

I walked the Trail of Time in awe. James Kaiser wrote in his book that, when walking the Trail of Time, with each meter, you are walking one million years. “So, the 1.3-mile trail, which stretches between Yavapai Geology Museum and Verkamp’s Visitor Center, represents 2.1 billion years of Earth history.”

At the west end of the Trail of Time is Verkamp’s visitor center named after John G. Verkamp, a pioneer who began selling “curious” to visitors in 1905. His family ran the bookstore, the early pioneer historical exhibits, and information desk for 103 years, the longest family-owned business in all parks. The National Park Service bought it in 2008.

Hopi House seen from El Tovar porch

The Vishnu Basement Rocks at the bottom of the Inner Gorge formed 1.7 billion years ago “when magma hardened and joined this region (once a volcanic ocean chain) to the North American continent.” Rising to 7,533 feet, the Vishnu Temple is a pyramid named by geologist Clarence Dutton after the Hindu’s four-armed Supreme Being. This geological formation can be admired from many viewpoints along Desert View Drive. (Museum Archives)

View of the South Rim from El Tovar Lodge

The Havasupai, according to their tribal history, have lived in and around the canyon for more than 800 years. The Paiute, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi tribes, preceded by ancestral Pueblo people have one time or another inhabited the Grand Canyon. But when the Grand Canyon land was taken and turned into a reserve and later into a national park, the tribal lands became public lands.

The Havasupai received in 1975 a substantial portion of their land back from the federal government once their cause was pleaded publicly. The tribe capitalized on tourism; the cerulean blue pools and red rocks of Havasu Falls are a great attraction for 20,000 visitors each year.

Mary Colter, a famous architect, designed eight buildings at the Grand Canyon, among them the Hopi House, Bright Angel Lodge, Hermit’s Nest, Lookout Studio, Phantom Ranch, and Desert View Watchtower.

The Hopi House was built in 1904 as a concessioner facility for the historic inhabitants, the Hopis, featuring their artisan crafts. Colter designed it to resemble a traditional Hopi pueblo with its low hanging door frames. It opened on January 1, 1905, two weeks before the El Tovar Hotel across from the Hopi House.

El Tovar Hotel, “the Ritz of the Divine Abyss,” built before the area became a national park, was designed as a destination resort by the Santa Fe Railway. The tradition to name places after Spanish names resulted in this hotel being named El Tovar after Pedro de Tovar, who spread the rumors of a large river in the area, inspiring the Garcia Lopez de Cardenas expedition in 1540, the first European to have glimpsed the canyon. They used Hopi guides. The expedition did not go far when they ran out of provisions. They decided that the Colorado River was small, only six feet wide when the river is 300 feet wide in places.

During those times, a destination resort provided an elevated level of luxury and comfort at “the edge of wilderness,” twenty feet from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Other such destination resorts were later built in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The same design was used in similar parks, superficially rustic but offering quite comfortable visits. Roosevelt stayed at El Tovar in 1911 and 1913 and even authored a book about his 1913 trip.

The sunset (the Hopi Point is the most famous view, but Mather Point is the most popular due to its proximity to the visitor center) over the Grand Canyon filled our eyes with an amazing painter’s pallet of dark blue shadows over the rock formations, with hues of orange, red, purple, and pink. Our left side cheeks and bodies were illuminated at just the right moment before the sun disappeared in the west.

The Abyss’s sheer cliffs drop from the canyon’s edge almost 3,000 feet. Here you can glimpse the top six rock layers which showcase 80 million years of our planet’s history.

The Grand Canyon is a shocking abyss, its geology is millions of years old, made up of cooled lava (basalt), limestone, sandstone, shale, dolomite, quartzite, granite, and other rocks. One mile down, the Colorado River shines a beautiful green. If one falls from the top of the South Rim, one will never reach the very bottom. He/she would disappear in the rocky and sharp chasm.

I viewed the ledge, whether with a retaining wall, a metal grate, or a chicken wire barely reaching my thigh, or nothing at all, as extremely dangerous, one eye blink away from a fatal misstep, dizziness, vertigo, or fainting.

Dee Dee Johnson, a stunning fashion designer, attempted to model “pedal pushers” on September 15, 1946, on the parapet wall of the South Rim while photographers were recording the moments with blinding flashes. In a split second, she fell off the wall and disappeared into the chasm below.

How many people fall off the rim is a frequently asked question. Nobody can give an exact number, but the rangers know for sure that falling off the rim almost always equals death. Dee Dee got lucky, and her fall was arrested temporarily by debris. She was saved by a swift ranger who was able to rope her to a Pinyon Tree and stop her falling into the rocky void.

Michael P. Ghiglieri lists 67 names of people who fatally fell from the Grand Canyon rims since the establishment of the park in 1919. (Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, pp. 33-42, second edition, June 2022)

The immense vista has a magnetic pull on all visitors. Adrenaline junkies fall into a bizarre category of humans who take stupid chances for reasons that the rest of us fail to understand.

Other humans add alcohol into the mix and the results are deadly. Some commit suicide, others play foolish pranks on their families and fall over, some pass out, some have heart attacks, others die of heat stroke (it is increasingly hotter as hikers descend into the canyon, a 30 degree F temperature difference from the rim), or hypothermia, lack of water; others disappear forever, their bodies never to be found. Fatal errors inside the Grand Canyon since its opening as a park resulted in 750 known victims who perished in various parts, for similar reasons.

My husband sat on a blanket watching the sunset over the canyon one evening but I was too spooked to even sit down close to the fenceless rim. I stood the entire time, took pictures, but kept my distance from the edge. I fought hard the dizzying magnetic pull of the void.

Young couples had brought their toddlers, babies, and infants, and while holding them in their arms or by their hands, they stepped at the very edge of the void. One couple had brought their two dogs. How can they not have any sense of danger for themselves and their babies, standing unguarded and unprotected on the rim of a mile-deep gorge? Are pictures and leaning over for a better look or a better selfie worth dying for?

Through the years, hundreds of people have fallen to their deaths, some were lucky enough to survive and be rescued, and lived to talk about it.

I would never understand the fascination of being at the edge of death, toying with one’s life for the sake of a better view or a better selfie, but I left the enormous gorge with a better understanding of my justified and rational fear of the dangers of Mother Nature. I felt the magnetic pull towards the edge; I stepped on the occasional loose gravel at the edge, and experienced dizziness and vertigo, the closer I got to the South Rim. I was painfully aware that one wrong step or slip would mean the difference between survival and disaster. Like my husband aptly said, we were “canyon-ed out” and were ready to leave the fierce and dangerous Mother Nature behind. Just because you can hike down the gorge, on foot or with mules, no matter how prepared, does not mean that you should. Mother Nature always has the last word.

The ride back to Phoenix was uneventful, we were jarred by the many cracks and potholes on the highways and on the interstate and the driver’s love of speed. You would think that, given the number of close to seven million visitors per year, the roads to the Grand Canyon and their maintenance would be stellar.

Free stock photo (author unknown)

I spotted a female elk grazing at the edge of the ponderosa pine forest and a male elk further in, standing majestically between the trees, with its huge rack visible from afar.

My photo of the female elk

Miles and miles down the road, below the 3,000 elevations, the forests were replaced by low desert brush and large Saguaro cacti. Once we made it to Phoenix, the pleasant cool air and temperatures were replaced by infernal dry heat, upwards of 103 F.

Would I go back to visit the Grand Canyon? I would visit the Western Rim with its Sky Walk but I am in no hurry. I would rather hike in our local forests, 45 feet above sea level, where the only dangers are the occasional snakes and recently seen bears pushed increasingly by northern Virginia deforestation from their habitat, to make room for more ugly apartments and condominiums.

 

Copyrighted photos: Ileana Johnson, June 2024 (except the female elk stock photo)

Trip to Sedona (Part II)

Exhausted from the trip to the Heard Museum, I decided to ride the metro back to the hotel and walk one block to shade and temperature safety. But my husband wanted to go back to the Heard Museum and eat a late lunch in the Museum Café. We took the metro once again and then walked all the way to the museum in even hotter temperatures. But the Café had delicious food and it was worth the trip. We walked through the outdoor gardens a bit and returned to the hotel.

Early next day, our Uber driver took us to a hotel on the other side of downtown Phoenix where we were taking the Detours company van to Sedona, with 10 other people. They turned out to be wonderful travel companions, some single, some couples.

The Uber driver, a lovely man hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico, who had been in this country for 50 years, serenaded us, unexpectedly, with a surprising song, Che sera, sera, which happens to be our favorite song. How he knew about it, I had no idea. We were both surprised.

Stan, our tour driver, and guide greeted us, and, after picking up other people, he drove to Scottsdale which turned out to be quite a sleepy town given the early hour in the morning. We picked up the last couple at the Marriott resort, fancy coffees and off we went.

We drove by many varieties of short cacti in bloom, including the infamous teddy bear (because spines look so fine) or cholla (pronounced Choya) cactus, and a few fields of Pima cotton. The Pima Indian tribe grows large fields of this cotton. The long-fiber Pima cotton grows as a small tree with bright yellow flowers. The cotton is superior because it does not pill like short-fiber cotton. The long fibers of the Pima cotton make any clothing last for years.

The landscape was desert sand and brush, wildflowers now and then and plenty of cacti, first small and then larger and larger Saguaros. A lone frame house, trailer, or RV would appear far from the road, not attached to any electricity or running water. There were powerlines close to the road, but nobody was connected to it. Water cisterns with the emblem “potable water” passed us by or were visible in the distance between the isolated homes. Nobody in the group could understand why people chose to live so far from civilization and so primitively. There were no solar panels anywhere nor wind turbines. Talk about the massive work of conserving whatever water people bought and stored from the traveling tankers with potable water!

The landscape changed to heavy and huge concentrations of Saguaro cactus mixed in with juniper trees and eventually huge ponderosa pine forests. When that happened, the Saguaro cacti disappeared – they cannot grow beyond 2,000 feet elevation due to colder temperatures. Any kind of frost destroys its arms, and the Saguaro plant eventually dies.

The first stop was the Montezuma Castle National Monument in Camp Verde, Arizona. The rock formations and carvings had nothing to do with the Aztecs or Montezuma and such connections were not proven. Presumably naturally occurring caves were eroded by water into the soft limestone or built by its inhabitants, the Sinagua people (1100 A.D. – 1425 A.D.), a pre-Columbian culture closely related to the Hohokam and other indigenous people of the southwestern United States. Nobody knows what caused the culture to disappear or if they moved themselves elsewhere when the water source ran out or became foul. The five stories structure contains about 20 rooms and the entrances look like caves.

The day was gorgeous, sunny, and breezy, the temperatures were milder, in the seventies. We were on alert for snakes (Arizona has six types of poisonous rattle snakes). Luckily only one juvenile was spotted by a group member. We were told that native tribes return to the area for religious ceremonies annually.

As we climbed higher and higher, the landscape resembled Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, with steep gorges, beautiful forests, and dizzying drops and gulleys.

From the Village of Oak Creek, heading north on highway 179, we came upon the Bell Rock Boulevard with its towering red rocks in the distance.

Bell Rock is a butte south of Sedona in Yavapai County with an elevation of 4,919 feet. To its east is the Courthouse Butte. Legend says that criminals were judged and executed at the foot of the Courthouse Butte, hence the name.

To reach the summit of the Bell Rock, an unmarked and challenging trail must be followed. The easier trail reaches a small plateau on the northwest face.

Sedona is said to have gained its New Age community in 1987 when hundreds of devotees gathered to watch the top of the rock which was supposed to crack open and allow a spacecraft to fly out. When that did not happen, and no little Martians made their appearance, nobody left disappointed. The legend continues to this day and the new date was set for 4044.

As we climbed to higher elevations to reach Sedona, at 4,350 feet, we stopped at the magnificent Chapel of the Holy Cross, surrounded by red rock buttes. The Roman Catholic Chapel was completed in 1956 and was built into the red rock within the Coconino National Forest. A wealthy local rancher, inspired by the Empire State Building, commissioned this chapel carved into stone. It has since become the most visited point in the area.

Climbing to the top, it was an awe-inspiring experience for me not only because the surrounding rocks and landscape were breathtaking and you could see so far away across the land from the top, but because I wanted to light three candles in the memories of my mother, my mother-in-law, and my dad, and I wanted to pray. I do not know if it was the mountain desert heat and the intense sun, or the solemnity of the moment, but I felt light-headed and had a slight vertigo looking into the chasm below.

Sedona revealed itself like a precious desert flower, colorful, artsy, hippy, in a crystal vortex of shops and restaurants, art galleries, and green gullies overlooking more red rocks like giants made of intricate and broken bricks peppered with juniper trees in the inimitable green of the waxy desert leaves. Unusual cacti decorated spaces with intense yellow, red, and fuchsia flowers, interspersed with hippy art.

                                                      Sedona seen from its highest point

 

TO BE CONTINUED

 

Journey to Grand Canyon (Part I)

For most of my adult life, I have dreamed of visiting the Grand Canyon, “the huge hole in ground” as my husband called it. Life got in the way, and we discovered other amazing places in America and abroad which we visited. Timing was perfect now and we flew for four and a half hours to the scorching lands of Phoenix, Arizona.

People kept telling us that the 100-plus Fahrenheit temperatures were just a dry heat and thus it posed little threat as long as we drank gallons of water per day. Upon hearing such comments, my thoughts went immediately to, my oven has dry heat, and I would not want to stick any part of me inside.

Sure enough, everybody we met was carrying bottles of water, some smaller, some larger, but plenty of water in case they were overcome by heat. So far this year, Phoenix had two homeless citizens who died of heat stroke.

On the first day, on my way to the Heard Museum downtown, I took the purple-colored light rail they called the metro.  The station was one block from our hotel and right across the green cross marijuana dispensary.

A gaggle of homeless people were congregating in the station, cheering one guy who walked out of the dispensary with a bag and a joint in hand which he promptly offered to share with me or anybody nearby. I declined and moved closer to the end of the platform. Two metro employees were standing close to me and seemed oblivious to and unconcerned about the drug use in front of them.

When the metro arrived, the interior was quite cool and pleasant and most of the car was occupied by homeless people riding to escape the suffocating 103-plus Fahrenheit heat. Some were obviously mentally ill. A kind man offered me his seat but I declined since I was getting off at the next stop. The car was otherwise clean and so were the streets.

I was told by the friendly Sudanese taxi driver, who took me from the airport to the hotel, that 10,000 visitors had descended for the week on downtown Phoenix for various conferences and he was doing a lot of taxi business. I regretted getting into his taxi as it reeked like someone had died inside. I made a mental note to avoid taxis from then on.

Once we discovered Waymo, it was a no-brainer, we did not use Uber or Lyft as the Waymo prices were lower and the Jaguar driverless SUVs were amazing and certainly drove safer than my husband and I combined. I am not sure how much radiation we were exposed to each time from all the devices, radar, lidar, GPS, Internet connection, Wi-Fi, etc. that made Waymo's SUVs driverless.

I walked slowly from the station to the museum in the stifling heat and I felt like my legs were made of lead. When I left Virginia, the temperature in the morning was in the upper 60s Fahrenheit. Now it was 103 F. I stopped often to rest and drink water, no shade anywhere to seek refuge from the beating sun, and finally reached my destination for the morning. I heard some birds chirping and I could not figure out where they were hiding from the infernal heat.

The Heard Museum was a lovely complex of southwest style buildings with cacti gardens and fountains in various inner courtyards. Statues and amazing varieties of cacti surrounded the inner courtyards where the sunshine scorched the flowers so intensely that they required umbrellas just like humans did.

The welcome sign described the 12 galleries named after various non-tribal sponsors, the world class café, and the outdoor sculpture gardens, a place for “advancing American Indian art.”

The museum did not allow bottles of water inside, so I had to check mine in. I was not sure what type of museum this was, but I soon discovered that it was more than about art, it was a Native American Heritage Museum staffed entirely by Native Americans, including the museum board.

The guide told us that the original Heard Museum had been anthropologically themed with artifacts from around the world which the Heard family had collected, including the majestic palm trees surrounding the property which had been brought from Egypt by Mr. Heard.

The museum housed beautiful black pottery by Maria Martinez (1887-1980), an artist from San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, and her family whom she taught the unusual craft of black pottery making.  Other San Ildefonso pueblo pottery displayed was polychrome but done with so much attention to its design, detail, and color that it was seldom rivaled.

More galleries included the Sandra Day O’Connor Gallery with a collection of dolls with beaded native American costumes, photographs of tribal cars, blown glass artifacts attached to thick sticks, and other artwork from Arizona’s 22 tribes, rugs and stories of the Navajo code-talkers during WWII, and photographs of Native Americans who died in recent wars.

Navajo code-talkers blanket

A heartbreaking section dealt with photographic and descriptive history of the Indian Schools which took children away from their homes and tribes. The government sent them far away to Indian Schools like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were forced to be white, to forget their roots, their language and culture, in order that the government could confiscate their ancestral lands.

The children fought back through their arts and crafts, drawings, games, and other methods. They were able to organize and keep their culture alive despite being prisoners in these schools, to a degree that the white government men did not expect. Some children did forget their own languages if they were taken too young.

Another exhibit included amazing basketry donated to the museum by a local Indian grocery store. Such artifacts are priceless and rarer to find as intricate basket weaving is becoming a dying art, the guide said.

One of the visitors asked the guide what the correct term was to call tribal peoples, i.e., Native Americans, Indians, indigenous peoples, etc. and the guide did not have a satisfactory and definitive answer – whatever the government decides.

I asked the guide if any of the displays remain from the time when the Heards were alive and she said no, all those artifacts had been moved to the basement and stored after Mr. and Mrs. Heard had died and the museum board became entirely Native American. I inquired why they had not changed the name of the museum from Heard to the Native American Heritage Museum, which is its true content today, but she did not have a good answer.

On the ground courtyard, large posters attached to the adobe walls talked about the Heard family. Dwight Heard had moved from Chicago to Phoenix in 1895 after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised by his doctors to move to a drier climate. 

According to the museum's archives, "In Phoenix, Dwight Heard became one of the largest landowners in the Salt River Valley. His investment company specialized in real estate and his holdings included the Bartlett-Heard Land and Cattle Company south of Phoenix, where he raised prize cattle, alfalfa, citrus trees, and cotton. Heard was actively involved in the political and economic decisions affecting water rights and who would control and manage the rivers that delivered this scarce resource."

The Heards' estate, Casa Blanca, built in 1903, was where the Heard Museum was built in 1928. The Heards collected Indian artifacts from Indian art dealers, trading posts, and items from their trips abroad such as Hawaii and Egypt.

TO BE CONTINUED