Grand Canyon National Park

How we ended up here

Nebraska in December is a good reason to be somewhere else.

We were headed to Sedona. That was the trip. But if you are going to cross Arizona anyway, and there is a national park more or less on the way, you go to the national park. That rule has never once let us down.

So on the day after Christmas, all four of us, Trisha and me and Lily and Landon, pointed the car at the Grand Canyon.

In through the east

We came in at the east entrance, which is the quiet one. Most people arrive from the south and go straight to the village. Coming from the other direction you get the brown sign almost to yourself, and the first viewpoint inside the gate is Desert View.

Obligatory sign photo. Non-negotiable, as always.

Lily, Landon and Tony sitting along the stone base of the Grand Canyon National Park entrance sign, with the National Park Service arrowhead beside them — Three of the four. Somebody has to take it.

It was cold and it was completely clear. No snow on the rim, hard winter sun, and that deep flat blue you only get at seven thousand feet in December. Everybody in a beanie. Nobody complaining.

Desert View

The canyon does not ease you into it. You walk maybe forty feet from the parking area and the ground simply stops, and then there is ten miles of air and the other side is a long way away and lower than you expect.

Desert View has the watchtower, a stone tower built onto the rim with rough masonry and wooden beams sticking out of it, and the canyon framed through every gap in the wall.

Lily and Landon standing between the rough stone walls of the Desert View Watchtower, the canyon behind them — Every gap in the wall is pointed at something.

The line where a billion years went missing

The stack you are looking at reads bottom to top like a book, except for one place where the pages are gone. The rock at the very bottom, the Vishnu Schist, is around 1.7 billion years old. The Tapeats Sandstone sitting directly on top of it is around 500 million. They are in contact. Nothing in between survived.

That is roughly 1.2 billion years of missing rock, and geologists call it the Great Unconformity. It is not a metaphor. It is a line, and you can point at it.

Ages per the Arizona Geological Survey and the National Park Service.

Stand with that for a second. Everything else in that wall is time you can account for, laid down in order, one layer at a time. And then there is a seam where about a third of the planet's history was stripped off and thrown away before the next page got written.

You cannot see a billion years. But you can see the gap where it used to be, which is closer than most of us get.

Tony and Trisha at the rim at Desert View, canyon walls lit warm behind them, both in cold-weather layers — Cold, clear, and no line for the viewpoint.

Look up while you are here

Everyone at the rim is looking down. It is the obvious thing to do and the canyon has earned it. But the South Rim is one of the few places on earth where what is above you is arguably the rarer sight.

The bird that nearly did not make it

In 1982 there were 22 California condors left in the world. Not 22 in Arizona. Twenty-two anywhere, every one of them known and counted. The species was taken into captivity to stop it ending.

Releases at the Vermilion Cliffs, north of here, began in December 1996. They are now regular over this rim, and a full-grown one has a wingspan of up to nine and a half feet, which is wider than most rooms you have stood in.

Recovery figures per Arizona Game & Fish and the National Park Service.

We are not going to claim we saw one. We were not looking, because we did not know. If you go, look up, and know that anything that big going over is not a vulture and is not a common sight. It is a bird from a population that once fit in a single room.

The practical bitDecember on the rim is cold, bright and empty. No crowds, no shuttle queues, no heat. Bring layers and expect the sun to be a lot stronger than the temperature suggests. The east entrance is the one to use if you are coming through from the north or east.

Like father, like son

Here is the part I keep coming back to.

At five past eleven, Landon walked to the rail on his own, put his hood up, and just stood there looking at it. No phone. Not asking anything. Taking the size of it in.

Three and a half minutes later somebody took a photo of me doing exactly the same thing, forty yards away, in exactly the same posture.

Tony standing at the edge with his back to the camera, looking out across the full width of the canyon — 11:08am. He got there first.

I did not notice at the time. I noticed two years later, looking at the timestamps on the photos, and it stopped me.

You spend a lot of effort trying to teach your kids things. And then it turns out some of it is not taught at all, it is just caught, and the evidence is a boy at a rail with his hood up, three and a half minutes ahead of you.

The verdict

One-Time Visit

We stopped on the way past, and it still landed.

This was not a Grand Canyon trip. It was a Sedona trip with a national park bolted onto the front of it, and we saw one viewpoint at the east end of a park that is 277 river miles long. By any reasonable measure we barely scratched it.

It did not matter. The canyon is not a place that rewards thoroughness, at least not from the rim. It delivers the entire message in the first ten seconds and everything after that is variations on it. Stand at the edge, understand that the far wall is a different day's drive away, and you have received it.

If you are anywhere near it in winter, go. Cold and clear beats warm and crowded, the east entrance beats the south, and a stop on the way to somewhere else is a perfectly respectable way to see it.

Then check the box and go find the next one.

Added laterNone of this was planned as a warm-up. But in May 2027 I am going back to walk it, north rim to south rim in a single day, with a group of men doing one hard thing a year. That one is Up & Down, and it is a very different way to meet the same hole in the ground.