Grand Canyon Photos: View Across the Inner Gorge,
Grand Canyon National Park

This photo was made during a backpacking trip down into the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

We had left the tourists and dayhikers behind a couple of day previously, somewhere on the descent down the Hance trail.

After a certain point only backcountry travelers continue, and they need the proper permits from the National Park Service (NPS). Although restrictive, the permit system not only seeks to limit the daily impact on the backcountry, but it also serves to spread out the few parties of backpackers that will be in any one area, so that you can experience a feeling of great solitude.

In fact, the NPS will not even grant you a backcountry permit for the canyon unless you can convince them that you have at least a minimum level of desert wilderness experience. Why? Because survival in the desert depends on water, in sufficient quantities and at proper intervals.

You have to have done your research: which springs will probably be flowing at the time of year when you will be there? And how much water do you have to carry on your back to get between those spots, with some overlap in case a spring that 'should' be flowing is dry? That's something that high country backpackers can too easily overlook down here.

At the time of this trip, I was a forester for an Indian tribe on the central Oregon coast, and my friend Steve was living on the Hopi reservation, where his wife was employed by the Indian Health Service. I was attending the annual Tribal Forestry Conference, in that year hosted by the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona. So Steve and I hooked up for yet another epic backpacking trip, only this time a desert wilderness trip.

It's almost a waste of words to say that the Grand Canyon can't be fathomed from the top, where all the tourists gawk. Yes, even up there it's unfathomable, but to really get a sense you've got to go down into its guts. That means either taking a river rafting trip down it, or walk down into it. Preferably with a backpack, so you can stay several days.

Down there, the side canyons are so immense, so deep, so towering and complex, so varied in rock strata and color, that you could plant your butt in a spot on the Tonto East Platform (for instance) and just sit and sit and try to watch and notice and wonder your brains out. As the sun comes up and creeps across the sky and sets, the myriad canyon walls change from minute to minute, the glowing reds and oranges and blues ever changing, with a deep blue sky straight up. Your world seems so still and hot, while all the time it moves and creeps and grows and sleeps and starts all over again with the following dawn.

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