Photo Friday: Grand Canyon, Part 3

It was a near thing, but I made it with Photo Friday on Friday! It's long, but to paraphrase Mark Twain and Blaise Pascal, I didn't have time to write a shorter post.

If you missed them, click here for Parts One and Two of my Grand Canyon rafting adventure. I'm covering two days per post so far, though with some major hikes coming up as well as some days when we didn't do much, that may vary.

Day 5

On day three or four I had wondered if 16 days would feel like a rather long trip. A couple of days of wind-blown sand made it clear that there could be conditions that would make it feel that way. But on the whole, it was starting to feel right, being on the river, and a realization was dawning that 16 days might not be enough.

Excitement mounted in the morning as we took a little extra time to pack bag lunches in preparation for our first substantial hike.

Morning preparations

 

Readying the dory for the day's row

Ten miles down the river we pulled in to camp by Escalante rapid and did a quick set-up before heading up into the tangle of ridges and hills above our camp. For those who imagine that that Canyon is a single monolithic hole in the ground, an area like this is a corrective. Our destination: the Tabernacle.

The top of the Tabernacle

At 2200' above the river, the summit of the Tabernacle provided fantastic views, but the climb was grueling. Between the river distance we had to cover and making camp, we started up after 11 a.m. I make a point of never hiking in the middle of the day in the desert, for good reason. But the river trip forced a different reality. We soaked our clothes and headed up (at least, the core of crazy hikers went for the top).

Even a short way up from the shore, camp looks small and unlikely.

The trail followed a knife-edge ridge above the camp for a time, wide enough to be comfortable but requiring attention.

A willingness to climb brings the reward of ever-widening views.

Looking back upstream, over the route we've hiked to the route we rowed.

Examining the flora, fauna, and geology makes a time-honored excuse to stop, as does photography.

Fossilized worm tracks.

Bright Angel Shale again, now a thousand feet and more above the river.

The overhanging cliffs below the summit gave us our only shade.

The view from the summit.

Relaxing gratefully in the cool after the sun went off.

We shoved off in the morning under almost the most cloud we had the whole trip. Weather can be dodgy in April, but though we roasted a bit in the midday heat, we had no rain, well under the average wind, and nothing to complain of.

The sixth morning took care of the photographer's gripe about boring empty blue skies.

 Scouting the rapids (Hance rapid, I think).

Regrouping after the rapids

To avoid getting caught in the congestion around Phantom Ranch, we took an early lunch (our Trip Leader, Lorna Corson, is as willing as I am to eat lunch early and often) on one of the best rock shores we encountered (I might have said that about several of them...).

Note the all-important umbrella shading the lunch table

By now we have entered the Vishnu schist, the fine-grained black rock, with pink Zoroastrian granite intrusions, both here polished by the river to a high gloss.

Soon after lunch we reached the first foot bridge, for the Kaibab trail.

It was kind of a mule train to come along just as we crossed under the bridge.

A half a mile later, we crossed under the Bright Angel bridge, the last vestige of civilization for 100 miles or more.

No hiking today, so we continued downstream for a 21-mile day.

 

Made camp in a spot that seemed so benign, but the wind came up and we realized why so much sad was piled up the hills against the rocks where we were camped. The wind and grit made this probably the least comfortable night, but also the last one I bothered with a tent, since the tent did little to keep out the grit!

For those who wondered... there are strict rules about human waste in the canyon. We were able to manage that in comfort. The yellow bucket is for pee, to be emptied into the river. Beneath the white lid is the "groover," for solid waste. By the end of the trip we had 8 sealed vaults full of that.

It isn't genteel, but you have to admit that it was a loo with a view!

Just to leave you with a more aesthetic shot!

 ©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2021

 As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated.

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Writer's Wednesday: Struggles

Death By Donut has launched! The Pismawallops PTA series is, at least for the moment, at rest. I am free at last to follow up with the new sleuth who took up residence in my brain over a year ago.

Or am I? It feels like everywhere I turn with my new characters I come crashing up against something that feels too personal, or too disturbing. I could try to write a mystery without a murder, but it's not just the primary death--it's people's backstories with their losses and traumas, all sorts of things. I'm a little scared to move forward. Am I afraid of my own feelings, or of what others will think if I write something that few people will actually know resonates with my own experience? And isn't writing about our own pain part of what we do?

I could shift from mystery to other genres, but for one thing, mysteries are what I write, what I know how to write and what my readers are coming to expect. For another, I think the basic problem will always be there: I now know what a big life-changing, traumatic event feels like. I have to acknowledge that in my writing. Maybe it means I have to take my writing to another level, not away from the humorous, but maybe towards something with more substance?

This is hard.

But bit by bit I'm finding my way into the story, working through or around the things that are too difficult. One thing I've come out of this year knowing: I'm a writer.

 

 

 ©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2021

 As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated.

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Nonfiction Audiobook Review: The Pioneers

Title: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

Author: David McCullough. Read by John Bedford Lloyd

Publication Info: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2019. 10hrs 23 min.

Source: Library digital resources

 

Publisher’s Blurb:

As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.

McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. “With clarity and incisiveness, [McCullough] details the experience of a brave and broad-minded band of people who crossed raging rivers, chopped down forests, plowed miles of land, suffered incalculable hardships, and braved a lonely frontier to forge a new American ideal” (The Providence Journal).

Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. “A tale of uplift” (The New York Times Book Review), this is a quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.

 

My Review:

To get the basics out of the way right off: this book is, as you would expect, well researched, well written, and well read. It is also an interesting look at a time and place I never thought much about--the first "westward expansion" following the Revolutionary War, into a part of the continent that I (west-coaster that I am) tend to think of as part of the East.

That said, the book's subtitle had me on guard from the start, on the watch for a kind of inherent racism that seems almost inevitable when writing about the "settlement" of places considered empty by Europeans, but which in fact are full of people. McCullough navigates that minefield reasonably well, though I think he could have been a little blunter about the ambiguity of the "American ideal." There is no doubt that the anti-slavery stance of the first settlers is laudable, along with the fierce determination and stamina with which they managed to get it written into law (as well as free public education, which is no small thing, though it's never clear to me if that education was extended to people of color). But.

 

While McCullough does delve into the ways that relations between the settlers and the Native Americans deteriorated--largely ruined by an idiot of a military man--he tends to gloss over the removal of the native inhabitants of the region to make room for that American ideal. While noting the irony that by the time the first settlers were dying of old age, the only thing left of the Indians was a fine collection of names for their former places, the author stops short of wondering how much that tarnished the nobility of the settlers. He mentions, but doesn't dwell on, the fact that the Indians were forcibly removed from their homelands. When we read of the slaughter of settlers and soldiers by Indians, the dead have names and histories. When the slaughter ran the other way, not much is said of the humanity of the dead.

My Recommendation:

The book is worth reading. The imbalance that I have pointed out is, I think, compensated by the glimpse into the changes that have rolled over this continent in the last 500 years. Still, I await the day when I don't have to go find a separate book to get the perspective of the non-whites in our history.

FTC Disclosure: I borrowed an electronic copy of The Pioneers from my library, and received nothing from the author or the publisher in exchange for my honest review. The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

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