My father instilled in me a love and fascination with our
national parks. When I was a child, he took us up camping on Mt. Rainier nearly
every weekend. At least once a summer saw us in the Olympics. I’ve since toured
Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Yosemite, and the Redwoods, and I currently live forty-five
minutes from the gates of Mt. Rainier.
But nothing prepared me for the Grand Canyon.
My family visited for the first time in 2016. The craggy
cliffs fading into the distance, the sheer drops, the silence! It is an amazing
place, and one I feel fortunate to be writing about in A Distance Too Grand,
out in October.
People have stood in awe of the canyon for eons. The
earliest human inhabitant of the area has been dated to 12,000 years ago, after
the last Ice Age. Native Americans found ways to live among the rugged cliffs
and thundering rapids. Missionaries, the U.S. military, prospectors, and lumberman
made brief forays into the depths. Army lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, in
his report of his exploration partway into the canyon in 1858, called the area “altogether
valueless.” He predicted that his would be the last party of Anglo-Americans to
visit this “profitless locality,” which would be “forever unvisited and
undisturbed.”
I’m glad not everyone agreed.
Additional explorers, such as John Wesley Powell, lauded the
majesty of the canyon. In 1893, President Benjamin Harrison protected the area
as a forest reserve. In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt added federal game
preserve protections. But it wasn’t until February 1919 that President Woodrow
Wilson would make the canyon and its branches a national park. About 44,000 people
went to visit it that year.
Today, the park boasts more than five million visitors a
year. That’s quite a party. Happy birthday, Grand Canyon National Park!
P.S.—Marissa and I will be off next week, partying
ourselves. We will be celebrating Labor Day and the end of summer. Look for new
posts the week of September 9th.
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