Grand Canyon: Last Day

(Canon 7D, 17-40f4L @17mm, ISO200, f4.0, 1/40th second, handheld)

Our last days were on a river, that was no longer a river. At least not the one we had come to know. As we approached Lake Mead, though the water still flowed, visible on the canyon walls 10 or fifteen feet up, there was defined bathtub ring of dried silt. Though the reservoir hasn’t been at full capacity for many years, its fingerprint remains solidified on the rocks of the canyon.

The rapids we were accustomed to encountering every mile or so vanished, in their place were growing walls of silt, and marks on the map noting where rapids used to be. Further down, we entered a new kind of canyon, one carved not from the rock, but from millions of tons of silt deposited by the Colorado into the stagnant waters of Mead. For miles we drifted down slowly flowing water between these walls as small avalanches of silt tumbled down in a dusty plume.

It was with great irony that the water (I hesitate to call it a river) regained something of its natural color as it died in the lake. But it did. The eroding walls of silt turned the lake into a mucky brownish red.

Our last night we camped on the top of a cliff. At least it would have been the top of a cliff had the reservoir not swallowed the canyon. But as it was we stepped a few feet up from the boats onto the desert rock, and that’s where we laid our sleeping bags.

Beyond the final walls of the Grand Canyon, the Sonoran desert opened up, the skies grew large and the desert rolled rather than soared. When I turned my mind away from the dead river and murdered canyon, it was extraordinarily beautiful. The slowly moving water. The evening light on the distant cliffs.

The fire campfire crackled as the sun slipped from the tops of the bluffs, and the river whispered past and waited, waited patiently for its chance to break free.

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