LIFESTYLES
WEEKEND, AUGUST 26-27, 2017
The Grand Canyon, 277 miles long and a million acres, receives about five million visitors each year. The canyon drops 6,000 vertical feet at its deepest point.
Grand
Colors
Road trip to the Southwest offers
bright world of rugged beauty
Capitol Reef National Park in Utah offers rugged beauty to the 750,000
people who visit each year to ogle the park’s domes, canyons, monoliths and
jagged cliffs.
Story and photos by KATHY ANEY
East Oregonian
he first glimpse of the Grand
Canyon took my breath away.
Yeah, I know it’s a cliché,
something all serious writers doggedly
avoid. Timeworn clichés, however,
originally became part of the vernacular
because they describe a truth in an
engaging new way. And this particular
cliché fit this particular situation. Gazing
out at the unending space, I actually
stopped breathing.
I knew all the stats from the guide-
books. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles
long and drops 6,000 feet at its deepest
point. From rim to rim, the gorge spans 18
miles in places. Hiking to the bottom and
back takes two days.
Somehow, the book knowledge doesn’t
prepare one for the vastness. No photo-
graph could fully depict this massiveness
of expanse or the hues of red, yellow and
orange or the layers of sedimentary rock
revealing a stony diary that exposes the
canyon’s geologic history for all to see.
As I gaped, a disturbing sight drew
my attention. Three twenty-something
men had stepped over the safety fence
and were picking their way along a spur
ridge that jutted out into the canyon. My
legs felt gelatinous as I watched the men
posing one at a time by the edge, one step
away from oblivion, as the others snapped
pictures with their smartphones.
Later, curious, I asked a Grand Canyon
public affairs person how many of the
more than 6 million people who visit
the park annually die in falls. Vanessa
Ceja-Cervantes said people definitely
die each year by falling, but couldn’t tell
how many. She said a dozen-or-so people
perish annually for various reasons. She
said some simply misjudge their own
fitness or the effects of hot weather, hiking
down below the rim and struggling to hike
back up. Some suffer cardiac arrest. A sign
posted a little ways down the South Rim’s
Kaibob Trail shows a man in distress. The
sunburned fellow is on all fours, vomiting
onto the trail, his backpack and T-shirt
shucked aside. Park Service employees
have fondly nicknamed him “Victor
Vomit.” The text on the sign advises hikers
T
See TRIP/4C
A visitor to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon poses for a photo after climbing over a safety fence. Most years, two or three
people die after falling.
Two turkeys wander near the road inside Capital Reef
National Park in Utah.
A lizard hangs out on a rock at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.