The day before we went to Piñon for the Sun Dance, we decided to go to that great wonder of Arizona: the Grand Canyon.

It turns out the canyon itself is only a portion of Grand Canyon National Park. There are also other trails, campgrounds, gift shops, food courts, and so on. That probably shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was, but when I pictured the Grand Canyon, I pictured just that: an enormous canyon.

We paid the entrance fee of $25, parked the bus, and then headed towards the canyon itself. It should go without saying that the view was absolutely breathtaking (see above). But once we descended into the canyon itself, it only improved. I had no idea that the canyon was going to be so green; the word verdant comes to mind. But there was vegetation everywhere, and squirrels which we soon discovered had been conditioned by decades of hikers and tourists to be not the slightest bit wary of humans. They would get so close you could reach out and touch them, then dart off to somewhere a couple feet away.

Americans made up a much smaller majority of the human visitors to the canyon than I expected. It seemed like a solid third of the people we passed were young, hyper-athletic francophones; among the Americans, only a percentage were the sort of people who are dead serious about hiking and willing to hike the 10.7 miles to the bottom. The rest, a large percentage of whom were children and the elderly, were content to hike around the top mile of the canyon.

We landed more on the latter side; we made it three miles down and then hiked back up. Even that was exhausting—as an elderly couple we passed joked, it was “three miles down and twelve miles up.”

It would have been interesting to see what the canyon looked from the bottom. But that would have been a two-day trip, and we had neither the tents and rations for that nor the initiative. Besides, we still had a Sun Dance to attend.

As we were warming up the bus to drive away, Ali looked out the window and started gesticulating feverishly. We looked over and saw a massive elk, its horns at least a head over my height, striding down the road. Despite the paved roads, the gift shops and the water fountains, the canyon was still his place, not ours.

Photo courtesy of Peter Hildebrand.