Invisible Force of the Grand Canyon

Two years ago, Dave and I visited the Grand Canyon, the South Rim. When the colossal chasm of rock and chaos, colored in purple, orange, pink, beige, and brown opened to my view I was overcome by a feeling of dizziness that I could not explain.

I was nowhere near the lip of the gorge, yet some invisible force was drawing me to it into this spell bounding rocky miracle and promising to slide me into the tranquility and silence of the sharp-edged gorge, pulling me with an invisible power.

While Dave, with his sandaled feet scampered below the rocks, a very dangerous move, I stayed as far away from the lip as possible. I got vertigo and could not explain why.

I learned since then that thousands of visitors experience a destabilizing force and adjustment when gazing inside the canyon for the first time. A number of them have become so dizzy that they actually toppled over the edge.

One example is a 1989 visitor from Japan, Yuri Nagata, who, when she was admonished that a German woman lost her balance and fell to her death three days earlier when she was watching the sunset, Yuri became wobbly and plunged over into the slope below, rolled several yards and then skidded over a 360-foot cliff. Yuri screamed all the way down to the horror of onlookers.