I ask your indulgence while they load. -thx
I now arrive at the subject of this, which is: I finally witnessed the
I believe my initial impressions within the first few seconds were: a feeling of "glory" (no other way to say it), quickly followed by disorientation, lack of depth perception (or super-perception), unbelievability, slow mental exhalation and vertigo. My need to grab onto something solid (a tree, a railing) was somehow very insistent. It felt as if somehow, the canyon had been created only moments before, as if I came upon it in its final seconds of forming, and the lowest levels were only now ceasing their descent. My eyes (I wonder how I must have appeared.....like some drug-numbed, raving fool) would drop to each level of colour, only to find another below it. After my mind found what could only have been the canyon bottom, five more levels materialized further down. The rest of the world (people, sounds, the other four senses) disappeared as my sight searched for the mental-anchoring 'other side ', and there it was, an impossible distance away, holding up the horizon. I was in the presence of some God. The kinetic energy of the place could have reached out and crushed me at any moment. I was a speck, a dot, an atom,... but it needed me to see it. I was sure that when everyone went home, that it would cease to exist 'cause it couldn't be real. Or maybe it was, and I wasn't. Slowly my other senses returned and I said: "OK, we've seen it, ..now can we go home?"--a feeble effort to relegate it to a more shoulderable reality. Within the next seven hours I went through 'my Canon T1 ' withdrawal, as I only had a very cheap, no adjustments, moronic camera with which to record this 'event'. Various observation points should have supplied oxygen to the weak of heart, or to us who forgot to breathe.
Balancing rocks, immense fissures, layers of age, colours never placed side-by-side before, textures from alien planets, formations of nightmare and heaven, bonsai trees tended by the wind, people in various stages of beauty-drunkenness, the sounds of camera-clicks, video-hum and loud silence, large cloud shadows belittled by the canyon's vastness, open spaces directly below, vomiting into your fear receptors, a galaxy of air held within rock boundaries, rivaling the sky, an unsettling feeling that you've come face to face, in person, with a beautiful monster of history, a cartoon moment: "Now I've seen everything. BANG.!!!!" All this descriptive verbalization doesn't have a prayer of inflating your expectations of the place beyond what you will experience in situ. Not even time moves here. We see what the ancient indian saw. 1999 and not a mark shows of this future. If you haven't yet, ....................see it.
Go,......feed your wonder.
This first is a panoramic shot put together from two frames.
(Thankyou, PhotoShop! What a graphics program!!!)
The deepest valley showing here, is about half the way down.
Someone threw a large arrow down.............
no, it's indicating the Colorado River, which supposedly, DID all this. In a normal periferal eye view, this picture shows about 2 degrees in width.
Cheap cameras take cheap shots. What can I say? Here, I was trying to show some kind of distance pereption. If you don't include something in the shot to compare with, your lovely photo of the Grand Canyon looks like you photographed the kids in their sandbox,..and missed! (That's Auntie Lolly, playing in the sandbox.)
Distance plays a large part in the colours you see, and often, the shadows prove that it's what you can't see that gives recognition to what you can. This angle is about 45 degrees off the perpendicular of the canyon, and the far edge on the right, is about 35 miles distant.
Combine this mind-numbing view
with anything else around
and the end result looks like some fantasy-novel book cover.
Tons of tourists hung around for the sunset, but were all looking toward the sun instead of into the canyon where all the action was. I ended up with this shot, and they are probably STILL seeing latent images of the sun, on their retinas.
This photo is simply beautiful and functional too. Georgette used the old "depth-by-treebranch" method and used it well.
This proves that Laura and I were honestly right there beside the Grand Canyon. As you can see by the reflection off of my dome, I had pulled a Mary Tyler Moore, and exuberantly thrown my beret into the jaws of the canyon itself.
A couple of weekends doing community service and the littering fine was history.
I followed the cliche orders of 'back a little further' until I lost the battle with our ole friend 'gravity'.
ANOTHER few weeks of community service and the bruises were all gone. (I only fell 640 feet, ....it could have been much worse.)
The river level is a whole new world to investigate. You can either take a small plane or helicopter through the valleys, hike down, ride the donkeys,
or try the new cliff-descent on a pair of 6-foot stilts, while carrying a small coffee table.
M o r e p h o t o s a s t h e y b e c o m e
a v a i l a bl e.