THE GRAND CANYON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS
The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land
comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified
Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round
Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Canyon, and the western slope
between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.
Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than
to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and
then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the
wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of
2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think
you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on
a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but
with pictographs resembling the ancient Phoenician signs from which
our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed
the canyons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings
round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there
are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet
high in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of
Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the
Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a
great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge
meteorite.
Of the Grand Canyon little need be said here; not because there is
nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all
the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You
can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole
length of the Grand Canyon--200 miles--and hundreds of the lesser canyons
that strike off sidewise from Grand Canyon are still unexplored and
unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on
down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in
from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp
holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit
and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and
forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An
average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified
Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff
dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canyon and
100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland
Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own
Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National Forests are not the
People's Playground of _all_ America; that they do not belong to the
East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned
in maintaining and protecting them?
You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana
admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to
another--both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in
a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from
$1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the
charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges
varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The
hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made,
with the greatest ease in a day.
Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big
knock-you-down variety! To go from the spacious glories of the boundless
Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is
like passing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery,
London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go
looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like
Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied
wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come
away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as
much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in
the Painted Desert.
In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to
reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic,
sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light,
when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and
cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when
you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see
whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by
spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the
shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and
wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.
Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars
on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods
of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the
gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a
tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and
someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both
ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent
trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we
went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and
he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants
must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of
big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply
buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and
broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no
excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.
The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are
unknown. Only water--oceans and aeons of water--could have rolled and
swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient
sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a
sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and
that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop
making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.
[Illustration: There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Canyon
in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and
been disappointed]
But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a
prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of
petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of
the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands,
caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.
Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in
blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and
primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same
colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard
you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard,
fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This
hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified
Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the
petrified wood was exploited commercially and shipped away in carloads
to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any
of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood
required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a
hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the
Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.
You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a prone
giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130
feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an
emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a
child--picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been
a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into
colored diamonds.
I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if
you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every
single bit of rock is ashine with the colors of broken rainbows; or go
there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of
light--there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big
thrill with a capital "B."
There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which
you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All
these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was
a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana,
was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert
Potter of the Forestry Department, Washington, who rescued Sheriff Woods
of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days.
Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others
he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man
and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At
Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000
worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and
Scott and Wilson--mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses
which they didn't steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on
the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you'll not
lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You'll
find your way in, if you know how; and if you don't know how, no man can
teach you. And at Adamana, don't forget to see the pictograph rocks.
Then you'll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity
of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.
Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the
gateway to many Aztec ruins--much more easily accessible to the public
than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by
easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon. These differ from the
Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken
advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable precipices
and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not
so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation.
The debris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe
brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice
into Walnut Canyon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation
would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the
debris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes' scratching over of
one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum shell that from the
perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service
has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government
might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some
slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and
suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling
gray stone canyons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of
these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff
houses--hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At
the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark canyon was evidently once a
stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race;
and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.
Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma's Castle and
Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6
a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle and the Well, where
you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.
It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the
Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks
of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an
easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of
the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a
ranch house in a cool canyon where health and holiday seekers can stay
all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to
the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the
creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you
drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at
Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived
up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp
outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month
as it now has between 100 and 200.
* * * * *
When you reach the Grand Canyon, you have come to the uttermost wonder of
the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America.
There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no
one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Canyon and gone away
disappointed. If the Grand Canyon were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe
to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who
yearly throng Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year
visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.
You can do the Canyon cheaply, or you can do it extravagantly. You can go
to it by driving across the Painted Desert, 200 miles; or motoring in
from Flagstaff--a half-day trip; or by train from Williams, return
ticket something more than $5. Or you can take your own pack horses, and
ride in yourself; or you can employ one of the well known local trail
makers and guides, like John Bass, and go off up the Canyon on a camping
trip of weeks or months.
Once you reach the rim of the Canyon, you can camp under your own tent
roof and cater your own meals. Or you may go to the big hotel and pay $4
to $15 a day. Or you may get tent quarters at the Bright Angel Camp--$1
a day, and whatever you pay for your meals. Or you may join one of John
Bass' Camps which will cost from $4 up, according to the number of
horses and the size of your party.
First of all, understand what the Grand Canyon is, and what it isn't. We
ordinarily think of a canyon as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks,
seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very seldom more
than a few miles long. The Grand Canyon is nearly as long as from New
York to Canada, as wide as the city of New York is long, and as deep
straight as a plummet as the Canadian Rockies or lesser Alps are high.
In other words, it is 217 miles long, from thirteen to twenty wide, and
has a straight drop a mile deep, or seven miles as the trail zigzags
down. You think of a canyon as a great trench between mountains. This one
is a colossal trench with side canyons going off laterally its full
length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone.
Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot mountain, you have to go up. At the
Grand Canyon, you come to the brink of the sagebrush plain and jump
off--to climb these peaks. Peak after peak, you lose count of them in
the mist of primrose fire and lilac light and purpling shadows. To climb
these peaks, you go down, down 7,000 feet a good deal steeper than the
ordinary stair and in places quite as steep as the Metropolitan Tower
elevator. In fact, if the Metropolitan Tower and the Singer Building and
the Flatiron and Washington's Shaft in the Capital City were piled one
on top of another in a pinnacled pyramid, they would barely reach up
one-seventh of the height of these massive peaks swimming in countless
numbers in the color of the Canyon.
So much for dimensions! Now as to time. If you have only one day, you
can dive in by train in the morning and out by night, and between times
go to Sunrise Point or--if you are a robust walker--down Bright Angel
Trail to the bank of the Colorado River, seven miles. If you have two
days at your disposal, you can drive out to Grand View--fourteen
miles--and overlook the panorama of the Canyon twenty miles in all
directions. If you have more days yet at your disposal, there are good
trips on wild trails to Dripping Springs and to Gertrude Point and to
Cataract Canyon and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the
Kaibab Plateau on the other side. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand
Canyon a year and were not afraid of trailless trips, you could find a
new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember
that the Canyon itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral canyons
uncounted.
When you reach El Tovar you are told two of the first things to do are
take the drives--three miles each way--to Sunrise and to Sunset Points.
Don't! Save your dollars, and walk them both. By carriage, the way leads
through the pine woods back from the rim for three miles to each point.
By walking, you can keep on an excellent trail close to the rim and do
each in twenty minutes; for the foot trails are barely a mile long. Also
by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who
bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful
just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and
upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge
when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. In fact, if you keep
looking long enough through that lilac fire above seas of primrose
mists, you can almost fancy those hoary old gods of Beauty and Power
floating round angles of the massive lower mountains, shifting the
scenes and beckoning one another from the wings of this huge
amphitheater. The space-filling talker is still bawling out about "the
mighty powers of erosion"; and a thin-faced curate is putting away a
figure of speech about "Almighty Power" for his next sermon. Personally,
I prefer the old pagan way of expressing these things in the short cut
of a personifying god who did a smashing big business with the hammer of
Thor, or the sea horses of Neptune or the forked lightnings of old
loud-thundering Jove.
You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the
Canyon; but unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the
knees, you'll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the
way down is steep as a stair and the distance is seven miles. In that
case, better spend the night at the camp known as the Indian Gardens
halfway down in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regular
daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or you can join
the regular tourist party both going down and coming up. Mainly because
we wanted to see the sunrise, but also because a big party on a narrow
trail is always unsafe and a gabbling crowd on a beautiful trail is
always agony, two of us rose at four A. M. and walked down the trail
during sunrise, leaving orders for a special guide to fetch mules down
for us to the river. Space forbids details of the tramp, except to say
it was worth the effort, twice over worth the effort in spite of knees
that sent up pangs and protests for a week.
It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if
rain brings out the colors of the Petrified Forests, you can imagine
what it does to sunrise in a sea of blood-red mountain peaks. Much of
the trail is at an angle of forty-five degrees; but it is wide and well
shored up at the outer edge. The foliage lining the trail was dripping
wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf in spangles of gold. An
incense as of morning worship filled the air with the odor of cedars and
cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds
below the Canyon rim than above it; and the dawn was filled with snatches
of song from bluebirds and yellow finches and water ousels, whose notes
were like the tinkle of pure water. What looked like a tiny red hillock
from the rim above is now seen to be a mighty mountain, four, five,
seven thousand feet from river to peak, with walls smooth as if planed
by the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between
these peaks would be dignified by the names of canyons. Here, they are
mere wings to the main stage setting of the Grand Canyon. We reached the
Indian Garden's Camp in time for breakfast and rested an hour before
going on down to the river. The trail followed a gentle descent over
sand-hills and rocky plateaus at first, then suddenly it began to drop
sheer in the section known as the Devil's Corkscrew. The heat became
sizzling as you descended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the
stupendous height and sheer sides of the brilliantly colored gorges and
masses of shadows above. Then the Devil's Corkscrew fell into a sandy
dell where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of
many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst would fill this gorge in
about a jiffy; but a cloudburst is the last thing on earth you need
expect in this land of scant showers and no water. Suddenly, you turn a
rock angle, and the yellow, muddy, turbulent flood of the Colorado
swirls past you, tempestuous, noisy, sullen and dark, filling the narrow
canyon with the war of rock against water. What seemed to be mere
foothills far above, now appear colossal peaks sheer up and down,
penning the angry river between black walls. It was no longer hot. We
could hear a thunder shower reverberating back in some of the valleys of
the Canyon; and the rain falling between us and the red rocks was as a
curtain to the scene shifting of those old earth and mountain and water
gods hiding in the wings of the vast amphitheater.
And if you want a wilder, more eery trail than down Bright Angel, go
from Dripping Springs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great many wild
mountain trails in the Rockies, North and South; but I have never known
one that will give more thrills from its sheer beauty and sheer daring.
You go out round the ledges of precipice after precipice, where nothing
holds you back from a fall 7,000 feet straight as a stone could drop,
nothing but the sure-footedness of your horse; out and out, round and
round peak after peak, till you are on the tip top and outer edge of one
of the highest mountains in the Canyon. This is the trail of old Louis
Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the
center of the Canyon and built his own trail to one of its grandest
haunts. Louis used to live under the arch formed by the Dripping
Springs; but Louis has long since left, and the trail is falling away
and is now one for a horse that can walk on air and a head that doesn't
feel the sensations of champagne when looking down a straight 7,000 feet
into darkness. If you like that kind of a trail, take the trip; for it
is the best and wildest view of the Canyon; but take two days to it, and
sleep at Louis' deserted camp under the Dripping Springs. Yet if you
don't like a trail where you wonder if you remembered to make your will
and what would happen if the gravel slipped from your horse's feet one
of these places where the next turn seems to jump off into atmosphere,
then wait; for the day must surely come when all of the Grand Canyon's
217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American
public as Egypt.