Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

From June 28th through July 3rd, I had the privilege of being on a raft on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. This was part of a family trip “for the guys.” On a trip put together by my father-in-law Allan, his two sons, me (a son in law), my three sons, two other grandsons, one grandson-in-law, and one great grandson spent five days and five nights on the Colorado River. These blog posts are part of the story.

Out West (shouldn’t there be a book or a movie or a song with that title?) you can see a long ways. That is one of the reasons I love to go out West. Not the West Coast mind you, but the West: Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, and other states out West. In Louisiana – a place I have spent much of my life – seeing more than a hundred yards means that you are probably driving on the Interstate and looking straight ahead. The trees are in the way. The same is true in Virginia. The hills and the trees are in the way.

There are places in the Grand Canyon where the walls of the canyon are only a few hundred feet apart. You can always look ahead or back, but sometimes the bends of the river reduce your sight to a hundred yards. Fear not, look up and you can see for a few thousand feet.

Most of the Grand Canyon allows you to see for miles. A problem with this – at least for people like me who like to put a number to the size of an object – is that you don’t know how big anything is.

One day we pulled onto the bank to look at a cave. Maybe it was a small cavern or a large cleft in the rock. I couldn’t tell. It was there, but there was nothing familiar next to it. There was nothing of known size in view to tell my brain that the cleft could hold ten or a hundred or a thousand people. Finally, some of our cast stepped into the cleft and provided the information my brain was craving. Holy Cow! That cleft could hold thousands of people! At least that is what I though at first. (See below)

I walked up the sandy beach into the cleft my self. Finally, a few of our group reached the point where the floor of sand met the declining wall of rock. Those people were small; that cleft was a small cavern. I had seen lots of such clefts in the canyon wall. Were they? Yes, they were all probably as big and bigger than this one.

Another  factor that helps with “how big is that?” is time. One day we spotted was is called “the chicken train.” A set of rocks on the highest rim. The first rock looks a little like a chicken with the rest looking like boxcars in a train. I had no idea of how large those rocks were. The best clue I found was that the next day I could still  see the chicken train. I had seen it for some 40 miles. I concluded that those rocks were each bigger than my house – much bigger.

Perhaps if I had brought a surveying tool, I could have shot the angles on all these far-away objects. I would have been able to compute their sizes. Sometimes, however, it is best just to wonder about the wonderful. The Grand Canyon is just that, Grand. It is full of wonder.

I later Learned that the cleft is called Redwall Cavern. It is 33 miles south of Lee’s Ferry, a.k.a. mile 33. Here is a photo. There are large rafts and people standing at the water’s edge. This is a B I G place.