The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon sits in the north-west corner of Arizona, carved over six million years by the Colorado River through rock that was already ancient when the carving began. It is 446 kilometres long, up to 29 kilometres wide, and in places a full 1,600 metres deep. The geological record exposed in its walls runs back nearly two billion years, one layer at a time, each stratum a different age of the Earth sitting directly on top of the last.

From the ground it is enormous. From the air it is something else entirely. The scale only resolves properly when you are above it, looking down, and the Colorado River at the bottom becomes a thread so thin you have to look twice to find it.

It is a Wonder on the Air track, and one of 528 real destinations in the Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours catalogue. El Cóndor YV-528 has been here.

Lobster Bob's postcard follows.

Hola Mijo! Lobster Bob here...

The first thing that happens when you fly over the Grand Canyon is that your sense of scale stops working.

Not because the canyon is large, though it is. Because the canyon is large in a way that takes several seconds to reach the part of your brain that processes large things, and while that is happening, you are looking at something you cannot yet measure. The Colorado River is down there. You know this. You have seen it on maps. But from altitude it is not a river. It is a line. A thin, dark, barely moving line at the bottom of something so deep the bottom is in a different climate from the rim.

El Cóndor YV-528 held her altitude and did not comment.

I had flown approaches to the Grand Canyon twice before this crossing. Both times I had a route planned, an altitude selected, a sequence of passes I wanted to make over specific sections of the rim. I had read the approaches. I had the coordinates. I had a logbook entry ready to write.

El Cóndor had a different plan.

She does this. Not dramatically. Not with any mechanical protest. She simply responds to the air with a confidence that occasionally suggests she has decided on the better line and is executing it while I catch up. The condor does not fight the air. It uses what the air is already doing. I spent three years learning to do the same thing. El Cóndor arrived knowing it. I have never been entirely certain she needs me to be in the aircraft for it to go correctly.

My planned route took us along the South Rim first. El Cóndor found a thermal above the Kaibab Plateau and we went north instead. I noted this in the logbook. I also noted something else in the margin. I do not recall writing it. The logbook records indicate I did.

The failure was simple. I had a plan for what I would feel when I looked down into the Grand Canyon from altitude. I had been to the rim on foot twice before. I believed I understood what the scale was. I did not. The rim and the air are completely different positions. From the rim you are looking across. From the air you are looking down, and the canyon is below you, and your understanding of how deep a mile actually is revises itself without asking permission.

I adjusted my route. El Cóndor had been waiting for me to do this.

Here is the thing worth carrying home.

The Colorado River did not carve the Grand Canyon in one event. It did not arrive one morning and finish by evening. It has been carving for six million years, removing one layer of rock at a time, and it has not stopped. The canyon you can see today, the one in the photographs, the one in the coordinates at the top of this postcard, is not the finished version. The river is still at the bottom of it, still working, still carving, and in another six million years the canyon will be deeper than it is today.

Six million years. Still not finished.

Say that at school. Watch someone try to picture six million years and quietly fail. Then tell them the river does not care. It has a schedule and it is keeping it.

I could see the river from altitude as a dark thread at the bottom of 1,600 metres of rock. It did not look like something that had made all of that. It looked like something that was simply going where it was going, which is, I think, the point.

El Cóndor held the thermal above the North Rim for four minutes without adjustment.

I wrote something in the margin of the logbook.

I do not remember writing it.