Feeling the Silence of the Grand Canyon

Of all the magnificent places I have seen around the world in my lifetime, nothing had ever prepared me for the surreal moment when my eyes were filled by an otherworldly sight, with an ethereal light, rock spires, cathedral rock buttresses, and indescribable colors of the most beautiful and dangerous gorge God has ever created.

Colin Fletcher called it the “soft, luminous light of a desert crevasse.” I found it to be a luminous Chasm painted in a fusion of pastel hues of blue, lavender, pink, yellow, and orange. Even looking at the canyon from afar, safely away from the rim, my eyes could not fix on any magical feature and my head was spinning in vertigo that continued even after I closed my eyes.

From the lip of the South rim, the depth, the distances, the sharpness of the sculpted and dangerous rocks were dizzying – cliffs, buttes, terraces, boulders hanging by a thread suspended in the air, hidden crevasses, hidden fatal cracks in what appears as a solid boulder, swirling dust picked up by the updraft currents, the suffocatingly hot temperatures going down, and the rain of rocks dislodged accidentally by the occasional hiker making his/her way down.

The Void is carved randomly through the rocky plateau of northern Arizona, more than 277 miles long and over a mile deep in the center. Its width is ten miles in some places, 21 miles via a well-beaten trail, and in others, thirty, and even forty miles wide depending on where and how one hikes across.

The silence of the canyon in day time is like a silent movie from long ago and at night it becomes dark silence that swallows even the sound of the drumming of rain.

Utter silence, seldom punctuated by the screeching sound of an occasional bird flying above, dominated this colossal amalgamation of rocks, allegedly cut through by the Colorado River. Watching the random lacy shapes, I could not help but think of Noah’s flood when perhaps this massive canyon, a dangerous and massive Wonder of the Natural World, was under water.

I could feel with every fiber of my being the utter silence of the Grand Canyon affecting all my senses with its primordial rocky loudness.