Celebrating the GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK Centennial: 1919-2019

FEBRUARY 2019

ESCAPE • EXPLORE • EXPERIENCE February 2019 2 EDITOR’S LETTER 16 THE EVENTS OF THE CENTURY 50 LOW BRIDGE By Noah Austin In 1928, construction workers put the final touches GET MORE ONLINE 4 CONTRIBUTORS on what’s commonly known as the Black Bridge. As www.arizonahighways.com 18 POINT OF VIEW bridges go, it’s not the most beautiful, but considering it was built by hand a mile below the South Rim, it’s An Essay by Charles Bowden /azhighways 6 GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK: 1919-2019 very impressive. That’s why, this month, it’s being des- @arizonahighways The first bills to elevate the Grand Canyon to national 22 NOT JUST ANY OLD PLACE ignated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. park status failed in the early 1910s. But support for the By Noah Austin idea grew, and on February 26, 1919, President Wood- Although Grand Canyon National Park is turning 100 row Wilson signed Senate Bill 390, which made the this month, the natural wonder for which it’s named is 52 GRAND CANYON SUITE Grand Canyon the nation’s 15th national park. Today, a bit older — about 35 million years or more. There are the park hosts more than 6 million visitors a year, and other big, old canyons in the world, including Tsangpo A story originally published in the December 1938 issue it’s one of the crown jewels of the National Park Service. Canyon in Tibet, but there’s no canyon on Earth as of Arizona Highways. By Kathy Montgomery beautiful as ours. By Ferde Grofé A Portfolio Edited by Jeff Kida 56 THE LAST PAGE 42 GO BY FOOT THROUGH THE FOREST An Essay by Craig Childs 48 THE CIRCUS HITS THE ROAD A collection of cartoons originally published in the September 1984 issue of Arizona Highways. By Bil Keane

A bighorn sheep eyes the photographer from a rocky perch in the Grand Canyon. John Blaustein FRONT COVER: Approaching the Windy Ridge 40x30, a painting by Scottsdale artist Amery Bohling. To learn about the artist, see page 4. BACK COVER: Ponderosa pines frame a view of Mount Hayden from Grand Canyon National Park’s North Rim. Adam Schallau CANON EOS 5D MARK II, 0.5 SEC, F/22, ISO 100, 24 MM LENS

2 OCTOBER 2015 www.arizonahighways.com 1 editor’s LETTER

—IN MEMORIAM— JO BAEZA 1931–2018

I DON’T THINK Jo would have signed was published in May 1999. “In the off on this. I think she’d have said: “You mountains, spring comes suddenly,” should be writing about the park’s cen- she wrote, “throwing open the door tennial. Not about me. It’s the Grand of morning like a child home from Canyon, after all.” school. Running water sings in every Like the best literature, Jo Baeza’s stream; standing water glistens in identity was rooted in humility. Even every depression. The aseptic smell of after so many standing ovations, she winter gives way to a scent so musky was humble. “I worry sometimes that and fertile and permeating it shakes my writing might be dated,” she told me, the senses.” “but so am I.” Her demure self-deprecation Over the summer, Jo and I talked was genuine, not desperate. There was a lot about her writing. And we made nothing left to prove. She was the master plans to meet in Pinetop, to take my wordsmith of the White Mountains. 7-year-old twins horseback riding. Sadly, we lost Jo last fall. It was just “You have my kind of girls,” she said. before Thanksgiving. She was 87. By any “Anybody who loves horses is a friend measure, she had a wonderful life. And for most of it, we were of mine.” But we kept getting interrupted. By her root canal and privileged to have her in our family. my deadlines. By forest closures and by life. I’ll forever regret Her first story, The Hash Knife Outfit, was published in June not finding her doorstep. 1956. “I guess I was born a writer up in Minnesota,” she said, The last correspondence we had was about her former hus- “but I wanted to be a cowboy. My dad took me to Saturday after- band Joe Brown — another of our longtime contributors. “J.P.S. noon cowboy movies when I was only 5 or 6. We’d get a sack of Brown had heart surgery at Tucson Medical Center yesterday popcorn from the old popcorn wagon and walk to the picture and came through in good shape. I’ll bet he’s not finished writ- show. It was about the only time I had my dad all to myself. ing! It is so important for writers to be surrounded by their Tom Mix introduced me to the cowboy way.” books and papers.” Her final piece, At Home in the Woods, was published in July And so it was for Jo. 2017. It’s a handsome collection of words that made her the “About 20 years ago,” she said, “people up in New Ulm, longest-tenured writer in the history of Arizona Highways. Minnesota, began bugging me to write a book about my fam- “What a great birthday present to have another story printed ily’s historic hotel, which figured prominently in the Dakota True West. Real Adventure. in the magazine,” she told me. “In a way, it completes my ‘Circle Indian Conflict of 1862. Maybe 10 years later I queried the editor of Life.’ When I graduated from Stanford in 1954, my English of the University of Minnesota Press, who gave me a full serv- Department ‘adviser’ was supposed to counsel me. He said, ing of encouragement. For the past 10 years I’ve been trying to ‘What do you plan on doing with your education?’ I told him, decide how to write it. I did a lot of research and came to the 866.878.2489 • VISIT-PRESCOTT.COM ‘I want to write for Arizona Highways.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m conclusion that most of the history has been written. Last week sorry, but you don’t stand a chance. They have the best writers I woke up with that “Hah!” writers get when an idea comes to and photographers in the country. Why don’t you go to work for them. I know what I’ll do, I thought. I’ll write a memoir about grow- the telephone company? Ma Bell always has job openings.’ I was ing up in the Dakota House in the 1930s and ’40s. My working title so mad, I came back to Arizona and went to see [Editor] Ray- is Dakota House Days. I guess I can’t die yet.” mond Carlson, a Stanford grad. He said, ‘I don’t have anybody I choke on those words now. There was so much talent left in Northern Arizona. Why don’t you write something and send inside. So many more characters, settings and plots. We’ll never it to me?’ I wrote a long, boring, scholarly piece on the Anasazi. know where she might have taken us, but we’re grateful for the He accepted it, paid me $100 and never published it. That was long ride we shared. Thank you, Jo. For your prose and your the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” poetry. For your legacy and your friendship. By now, I suppose, For the next six decades, she shared her many masterpieces you’re sipping whiskey with Raymond Carlson, Ted DeGrazia — she wrote like Nureyev danced. From the acclaimed Ranch and the other old-timers you knew so well. I sure hope so. It’s a Wife in September 1962, which was made into a book by Double- vision that’ll help me see through the tears. Ashes to ashes. May day, to the award-winning Springtime in the Mountains, which your horse never stumble. — ROBERT STIEVE, EDITOR

2 FEBRUARY 2019 PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW H. TOWLE CONTRIBUTORS

FEBRUARY 2019 VOL. 95 NO. 2 800-543-5432 www.arizonahighways.com Amery Bohling GIFT SHOP: 602-712-2200

BY ROBERT STIEVE PUBLISHER Kelly Mero

EDITOR Robert Stieve very time she touched a painting, my heart stopped. “Amery! I don’t In that regard, she might have an unfair advantage — the Teutonic mean- MANAGING EDITOR Kelly Vaughn think you should do that,” I whispered, as if someone were watching ing of “Amery” is “hardworking.” Still, there’s no Type A in sight. Amery is ASSOCIATE EDITOR Noah Austin on a security camera. “You can’t touch the canvas.” She didn’t listen, all B, thus her laissez-faire attitude about touching her artwork and casually E EDITORIAL though. She didn’t have to. They were her paintings. agreeing to create a 40x30 piece of fine art for our front cover. ADMINISTRATOR Nikki Kimbel

She was showing me around her gallery, and she kept noticing little The first time I saw the piece was a few days before Halloween. The front PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Jeff Kida

things that weren’t quite finished. Things that “needed” fine-tuning. She’s door of her studio in Old Town Scottsdale was wide open, and there was no CREATIVE DIRECTOR Barbara Glynn Denney

always fine-tuning. At least the paintings on the wall that day were dry. Her one else inside. Just Amery. I could see the painting off to the left, leaning ART DIRECTOR Keith Whitney

mother, Holly, says it’s not unusual for her daughter to take a wet paper against the wall. But we didn’t go there. Instead, we sat down and talked MAP DESIGNER Kevin Kibsey

towel to a painting she’s working on and wipe it clean. That’s how Amery is. about everything else, and she poured a couple of glasses of Siete Leguas. PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Michael Bianchi

Outrageous enough to be exceedingly talented, but smart enough to own her I’d never brokered an art deal before, and figured the glasses were part of DIRECTOR OF SALES own gallery. Right brain. Left brain. an ancient ritual. It’s a good ritual. Then she gave me the tour. Seventeen AND MARKETING Karen Farugia It’s what comes out of the right side that caught my eye. Amery has been a minutes later, we got to the painting. She calls it Approaching the Windy Ridge WEBMASTER Victoria J. Snow headliner at the Grand Canyon Celebration of Art for many years, and that’s 40x30. “It took a long time,” she told me. And then she talked about scouting CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Nicole Bowman where I first saw her work. I’m not smart enough to know why it stood out the location. There were many trips. She even hiked down in deep snow. DIRECTOR OF FINANCE Matthew Bailey to me — I think it’s the way she paints light — but something resonated. Because it’s the park — not the Canyon itself — that’s turning 100, we OPERATIONS/ IT MANAGER Cindy Bormanis A few years later, Grand Canyon National Park turned 99, and we started wanted the painting to show a human element, something related to the thinking about how to commemorate the centennial. day-to-day of running the park. Amery suggested a trail crew, and recruited CORPORATE OR In our long history, we’ve done more than a hundred covers featuring the Lamai Krisintu and Richard Granberg to be her models. “There aren’t a lot TRADE SALES 602-712-2018

Grand Canyon, and almost every one of them has been a photograph. For of places where you can show a trail against the backdrop of the Canyon,” SPONSORSHIP SALES this, though, we wanted something different. Something special. Something she says. The place she found is on the South Kaibab Trail, just below Ooh- REPRESENTATION On Media Publications Deidra Viberg in the tradition of Louis Akin, Thomas Moran and Gunnar Widforss. I kept Aah Point. She proudly talked about the painting the way Holly talks about 602-323-9701 thinking about Amery, but figured it was a long shot. Undeterred, I texted her, and pointed to this and that. But she never actually touched the canvas. her. It was 1:58 p.m. That is, not until the day after Halloween, when I went back with Jeff Kida LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [email protected] “Hello Amery. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to chat about the cover and his Nikon D700. 2039 W. Lewis Avenue for our February issue, which will celebrate the centennial of Grand Canyon By then, the painting had been mounted on her easel, a Hughes Model Phoenix, AZ 85009 National Park. I’ll tell you upfront that you’re out of our price range, but we 4000, which has an internal counterbalance mechanism that makes it easy do have a budget, and perhaps you’d see some other value in being on the to move up and down. Amery was in a cream-colored dress, something she GOVERNOR Douglas A. Ducey cover.” might wear to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Scottsdale DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT One minute later, she texted back. “Sure. Is now a good time?” Artists’ School. “I’m a neat painter,” she says. “I’ve actually painted in this OF TRANSPORTATION John S. Halikowski We talked, and just like that, we had a plan. dress.” The vintage Ralph Lauren turquoise jewelry, however, was new to

the equation. Arizona Highways® (ISSN 0004-1521) is published The plan was to make some images of Amery sitting in front of her easel, monthly by the Arizona Department of Transportation. Subscription price: $24 a year in the U.S., $44 outside AMERY BOHLING WAS BORN IN LINCOLN, Nebraska. A few years later, next to the dark-wood taboret that her father, Gale, had built to store the the U.S. Single copy: $4.99 U.S. Call 800-543-5432. UP- when she was 5, she moved to Arizona with her parents and her younger hundreds of tubes of Utrecht, Rembrandt and Michael Harding oil paint she DATED PRIVACY POLICY: Our privacy policy has been updated to reflect the new changes in data protection sister, Sara. Somewhere in there, she learned how to hold a crayon, and her keeps on hand. While Jeff was busy setting up his lights and The Gants were laws, including the EU’s General Data Protection Regu- path was set. Her first canvas was a bright-white pair of baby shoes. Later, singing I’m a Snake from an iMac, Amery was being playful. Then she picked lations. To read our updated privacy policy, go to www .arizonahighways.com/privacy-policy. Subscription cor­re­ she used her sister’s forehead. In high school, she took the same elementary up a Rhenish round No. 8 brush with her right hand, her pinkie finger pointed spon­dence and change of address information: Arizona art classes the rest of us took, but there weren’t any epiphanies, nor any art straight out, parallel to the brush. Her pinkie was actually touching the can- Highways, P.O. Box 8521, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8521. Peri­ odical postage paid at Phoenix, AZ, and at additional teachers who really inspired her. Not the way Monet was inspired by Manet. vas, probably to steady her hand as she added highlights to a rock on the mailing office. Canada Post international publications Even an art degree from the University of Arizona didn’t shape her much. lower right side of the painting, and more grass to a clump on the other side. mail product (Cana­dian distribution) sales agree­ment “It’s nice to have a degree,” she says, “but I learned more from taking It occurred to me as I was driving away that I hadn’t noticed her signature No. 40732015. Send returns to Quad/Graphics, P.O. Box 456, Niagara Falls ON L2E 6V2. Post­master: Send ad- workshops.” Most of them took place at Scottsdale Artists’ School — on on the painting — she signs her work “Amery.” Later, she told me that she dress changes to Arizona Highways, P.O. Box 8521, Big spring break, between semesters, whenever she could. Eventually, she orga- never signs until she’s finished. Even though she’s never quite finished. Sandy, TX 75755-8521. Copy­right © 2019 by the Ari­zona Department of Trans­­por­­tation. Repro­duc­tion in whole or nized her own show in Tucson — right brain, left brain — and never really in part with­­out permission is prohibited. The magazine looked back. “But you can’t be a ‘holiday painter,’ ” she says, referring to a EDITOR’S NOTE: On September 14, Approaching the Windy Ridge 40x30 will be available for does not accept and is not responsible for un­solicited mater­ ials.­ shilly-shally commitment to the craft. “You have to work hard to stay ahead purchase at the Grand Canyon Celebration of Art. Proceeds will benefit the Grand Canyon PRODUCED IN THE USA of everyone else.” Conservancy. For more information, please visit www.grandcanyon.org.

4 FEBRUARY 2019 PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEFF KIDA www.arizonahighways.com 5 GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK 1919-2019 The first bills to elevate the Grand Canyon to national park status failed in the early 1910s. But support for the idea grew, and on February 26, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed Senate Bill 390, which made the Grand Canyon the nation’s 15th national park. Today, the park hosts more than 6 million visitors a year, and it’s one of the crown jewels of the National Park Service. BY KATHY MONTGOMERY

TORIES ABOUT HOW THE GRAND CANYON BECAME a national park often begin with President Theodore Roosevelt disembarking from a railcar in 1903, peering over the South Rim from atop a white horse and exhorting Americans to “leave it as it is.” S“Keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you,” he famously said. Five years later, Roosevelt created Grand Canyon National Monu- ment. He may have been the Canyon’s most celebrated spokesman, but he wasn’t its first. It was a senator from Indiana who first introduced legislation to preserve the Canyon as a “public park.” But all three bills he ELEBRATING ITS CENTENNIAL THIS MONTH, In fact, the public’s regard for the Canyon represents one introduced died in committee. Grand Canyon National Park has become one of of the most remarkable reversals in modern history. It wasn’t until that senator, Benjamin Harrison, became president that the country’s most beloved sites. More than 6 mil- Today’s veneration would have seemed unfathomable to he succeeded in declaring the Grand Canyon a forest reserve, in 1893. Clion people visited the park in 2017; among national parks the Spanish, who first happened upon the Canyon in 1540. A Grand Canyon National Park And it would take a third president, Woodrow Wilson, to sign into law ranger guides a small group of (excluding recreation areas, parkways and other types of One explorer described the Canyon as “a horrible abyss.” the bill that finally made the Canyon a national park. park visitors along the Rim Trail National Park Service sites), only Great Smoky Mountains And a 19th century fur trapper saw it as “horrid mountains, in the 1930s. This spot is near National Park, in Tennessee and North Carolina, had more which so cage [the Colorado River] as to deprive all human Kolb Studio on the South Rim. Courtesy of Grand Canyon National visitors. In hindsight, it seems obvious, even inevitable, beings of the ability to descend to its banks and make use Park Museum Collection that the Grand Canyon would be revered and protected. of its waters.” It wasn’t until after the railroad came to

6 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 7 Northern Arizona in 1882 that white men saw the Can- yon as anything but a horrendous obstacle. Edward E. Ayer, who opened the first lumber com- pany in Flagstaff, became the Canyon’s first recorded tourist when he hired nearby sheep ranchers to guide him to the South Rim in 1884. The same year, John Hance, a prospector who eventually became a tourist guide, homesteaded a place on the South Rim. He later improved an old Indian trail into the Canyon. Twelve years later, and about 16 miles farther west, James Thurber built a cabin — the first structure ever built at the site of today’s Grand Canyon Village. But mining was the biggest draw, and prospectors built most of the early trails. Even Hance mined copper and asbestos in the slow season. In 1891, two years before the Grand Canyon became a forest reserve, a group of prospectors began work on Bright Angel Trail, improving a Havasupai footpath along the Bright Angel Fault. The railroad was next to arrive. Businessmen in Flag- staff tried for years to raise money to build a passenger line from the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad to the South

BELOW: Emery (left) and Ellsworth Kolb pose for a photo at their South Rim studio, circa 1904. Next to the studio is the Bright Angel Trail tollgate. ABOVE, RIGHT: A man carries equipment in the Grand Canyon during F.E. Matthes’ Rim. But William Owen “Buckey” O’Neill, who found 1902 surveying expedition for the U.S. Geological Survey. time to prospect in the Canyon between his many other Courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection (2) occupations, ultimately persuaded Lombard, Goode and Co. to construct a line from Williams. The company incorporated the Santa Fe and Grand Canyon Railroad in 1897. After purchasing the railroad in 1901, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway completed the line to the South Rim, building its depot near Thurber’s Bright Angel Hotel and nearby campground. For the first few years, the railroad maintained a partnership with Bright Angel, but it had something more luxurious in mind. In 1905, it opened El Tovar — named, ironically, for a member of the 1540 Spanish expedition who never saw the Canyon. Entrepreneurs also saw opportunities to serve the growing tourist trade. In 1903, Emery and Ellsworth Kolb opened their photographic business in a tent before building a studio at Bright Angel Trailhead the following year. They later became the first to navigate the Colo- rado River from Wyoming to the Gulf of California, and the film they made of their voyage became a staple of Canyon tourism. John George Verkamp’s first venture, selling curios at Bright Angel Camps for Babbitt Brothers Trading Co., didn’t last. But he returned in 1905 and built his own shop east of Hopi House, the Fred Harvey store. And prospectors continued to locate mines. By 1900, Ralph Cameron had bought an interest in many of them, controlling some of the most scenic views in the Canyon, including Indian Garden and key spots along Bright Angel Trail. When Roosevelt made his famous visit in 1903, he The Kolb brothers tend to their boats on the Colorado River in 1911. This site is near the end of the South Rim’s Bright Angel Trail. found a bustling community. But it was a quarrelsome Northern Arizona University Cline Library

8 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 9 Ironically, the Great Depression spurred one of the “That’s when we started building tents,” Schnur largest building campaigns in the park’s history. The recalls. “We’d save those for when people would show When Roosevelt made his Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program designed up with no place to stay and were desperate.” to put people back to work, devoted more money and The country was also in the midst of the Cold War. In famous visit in 1903, he found a labor to Grand Canyon National Park than to any other a 2013 interview with Arizona Highways, the late Mike site in Arizona. The most notable of some 250 projects Verkamp recalled seeing flashes from atomic blasts at bustling community. But it was the CCC completed include Bright Angel Campground, the Nevada testing site from above his family’s store on a quarrelsome place: Miners and near Phantom Ranch; the Clear Creek and Ribbon Falls the South Rim. And in the early 1950s, amateur prospec- trails; and the 2-mile River Trail, the most difficult and tors detected radiation on the inholding where Kachina pioneers were at odds with the hazardous trail ever built in the Canyon. It also installed Lodge was located. a trans-Canyon telephone system, a feat that required It turned out the mining claim contained some of the railroad, and everyone was at dangling from ropes above 400-foot ledges. In 1986, the highest-grade uranium in the country; for a time, the system became the first U.S. telephone line placed on the hotel’s gift shop sold samples. Because the mine was pat- odds with Cameron, who bought National Register of Historic Places. ented before the Canyon’s designation, the Park Service While visitation plunged during the Depression and was powerless to stop the mushrooming operation. the rights to Bright Angel Trail, World War II, tourists began arriving in droves in the In 1962, with the private claim played out, President 1950s. Most arrived in cars, which made planning for John F. Kennedy signed into law a bill permitting the built a gate at the entrance and them difficult. In 1927, Fred Harvey built a motor lodge mining company to tunnel underneath the national park to accommodate motorists, but chronic shortages left for 25 years in exchange for the title to the property and began charging for its use. travelers with nowhere to stay. its structures. Both the inn and the mine closed by the “Fred Harvey was usually filled for the whole summer,” end of the 1960s, but the headframe stood for decades recalls Paul Schnur. For two summers, Schnur managed before being dismantled. Kachina Lodge, built on a privately owned mining claim The Canyon’s most recent building boom also began near Grand Canyon Village. He remembers tourists in the 1950s. Planned to conclude with the Park Ser- showing up hungry and frantic, with kids and without vice’s 50th anniversary in 1966, it was part of a national reservations. program called Mission 66. Construction at the Canyon, though, continued into the 1980s. Under the direction of architect Cecil Doty, Mission 66 discarded the Park Rus- El Tovar’s Harvey Girls, wearing their evening uniforms, pose for a photo with manager Victor Patrosso in the 1920s. tic architectural style in favor of a more modern design. Courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection It also included the development of the Mather Business

place: Miners and pioneers were at odds with the rail- ABOVE, LEFT: John Hance (standing) speaks with Theodore road, and everyone was at odds with Cameron, who Roosevelt during one of Roosevelt’s trips to the Grand Canyon. bought the rights to Bright Angel Trail, built a gate at the ABOVE: Hermit Camp, an early luxury campsite below the entrance and began charging for its use. South Rim, is shown in the early 1910s. Operations ceased at the site in 1930, but building foundations are still visible along Retaining control of the trail became Cameron’s the Hermit Trail. lifelong crusade. His battle against the railroad and the Courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection (2) Park Service inspired construction of the Hermit and South Kaibab trails as alternatives. The fight reached the just three years earlier, became its custodian. Under its halls of Congress and spawned a flurry of lawsuits that management, the modern park began to take shape. reached the U.S. Supreme Court before the government wrested control of the trail in 1928. ONSTRUCTION OF TOURIST FACILITIES FELL The first bills to elevate the Grand Canyon to national to concessioners. In the 1920s, Fred Harvey built park status failed in the early 1910s. But support for the Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon, idea grew, and on February 26, 1919, President Wilson Cwhile the Utah Parks Co., a subsidiary of the Union signed Senate Bill 390, which made the Grand Canyon Pacific Railroad, built the North Rim’s Grand Canyon the nation’s 15th national park. The Park Service, created Lodge directly opposite El Tovar.

10 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 11 Zone, now known as Market Plaza, east of Grand Can- the dining and lodging concessions on the South Rim. In to persuade the Verkamp family to raze their build- yon Village. For the business zone’s centerpiece, Doty 2007, Xanterra bought the Grand Canyon Railway from ing and relocate to the Mather Business Zone, but the designed a new visitors center. Now used as the park’s the couple who had revived passenger service in 1989, family resisted. “They never liked that building,” Steve headquarters, it was the first Mission 66 visitors center restoring the company’s historical ties with the railroad. Verkamp recalls. “[Administrators] thought it was a in the country. And the Park Service finally achieved its long-held crummy, old, simple-minded framed store … an eyesore.” Other projects expanded facilities at Desert View, goal of eliminating all of the park’s inholdings. Ells- But years later, Steve’s sister, Susan, found evidence that Indian Garden, Phantom Ranch and the North Rim, and worth Kolb died in 1960, and his brother, Emery, sold John George Verkamp hired El Tovar architect Charles improved the park’s roads and trails. And in 1965, work his studio and residence to the agency in 1962, but he Whittlesey to design it. “So they were built at the same began on the Trans-Canyon Pipeline, which still trans- retained the right to live there and operate the studio time by the same architect, basically,” he says. ports water from Roaring Springs, below the North Rim, until his death. Emery died in 1976, and the park’s After operating for more than 100 years, Verkamp’s to facilities on the South Rim. Separately, administrators nonprofit partner, Grand Canyon Association (recently Curios closed in September 2008. Then, after finally con- and residents raised money to build a new hospital, now renamed Grand Canyon Conservancy), restored Kolb ceding the building’s historical value, the Park Service the clinic, in 1968, and Shrine of the Ages, a general- Studio in the 1990s and uses it today as a bookstore, reopened it as Verkamp’s Visitor Center later that year. purpose building originally intended to be a church, information center and art display space. Despite some of the other challenges, park officials in 1970. Through the mid-1960s, park administrators also tried did convince Babbitt Brothers Trading Co. to relocate. For its part, Fred Harvey built Yavapai Lodge in 1958, Thunderbird Lodge in 1968 and a new Kachina Lodge in 1971. In the early 1980s, it replaced nearly 100 cabins at light-rail system — supplemented by shuttles, paths Tourists began arriving in droves in the 1950s. Most arrived in cars, which made planning the motor lodge with two-story, multi-unit accommoda- and bike trails — that would have eliminated cars from tions, renaming the facility Maswik Lodge. much of the South Rim by 2010. for them difficult. In 1927, Fred Harvey built a motor lodge to accommodate motorists, Five years earlier, in 1975, the Grand Canyon National The route would have originated outside park bound- Park Enlargement Act expanded the park to its current aries, near Tusayan, and delivered passengers to two but chronic shortages left travelers with nowhere to stay. 1.2 million acres, absorbing two national monuments depots built even before bids went out for the light-rail and returning 83,800 acres to the Havasupai Tribe. system: Maswik Transportation Center near Grand Can- About that time, park planners began grappling with yon Village, built in the early 1990s, and Canyon View Motorists line up to pay the park’s entrance fee at the South Rim entrance station in August 1951. Courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection increasing crowds, traffic and pollution caused by tour- Information Plaza at Mather Point, opened in 2000. ists and their cars. The park’s 1995 General Management But after a decade of planning, three members of Plan aspired to solve the problem with a mandatory Congress balked just as the Park Service was preparing to solicit bids. Citing cost, inconvenience and stagnating visitation, they derailed the plan. “Therein lies a cart- BELOW: Old wagon wheels punctuate a view of Phantom Ranch’s swimming before-the-horse story of the New West,” wrote a New pool, since removed, in a Josef Muench photograph from the 1950s. Northern Arizona University Cline Library York Times reporter who described a train station with “neither tracks nor trains … on a light-rail transit system ABOVE, RIGHT: The Bright Angel Lodge soda fountain, shown shortly after its June 1955 completion, was a popular destination for lodge guests and other that does not exist and is not being built.” South Rim visitors. Courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection Administrators ultimately rolled out a voluntary bus system. Seasonal buses now deliver passengers from Tusayan to the Grand Canyon Visitor Center at Mather Point, and the park now features expanded parking facilities and multiple bus routes that ferry visitors to South Rim destinations. In addition, the Greenway Trail extended the Rim Trail east to the South Kaibab Trail, with segments connecting the Grand Canyon Visitor Center to Tusayan, Market Plaza, Mather Campground and Trailer Village.

URING THIS TIME, CONCESSIONERS WERE adjusting to new realities. With dwindling demand for rail service, the Santa Fe Railway Dbegan shedding its national park holdings in the 1950s. The company transferred some Grand Canyon proper- ties to Fred Harvey and others to the government. It discontinued passenger service to the South Rim in the late 1960s and freight service in 1972, the same year the Utah Parks Co. donated its North Rim facilities to the Park Service. Amfac Inc. purchased Fred Harvey’s Grand Canyon assets in 1968. The company, which changed its name to Xanterra Parks and Resorts in 2002, still retains some of

12 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 13 WE MADE A NEW BOOK ABOUT AN OLD PARK.

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Yavapai Point, on the South Rim, offers a view up Bright Angel excludes the Native Americans who first occupied the Creek in a George Alexander Grant photo from the late 1920s. land. “It’s taken many years to understand that relation- Courtesy of National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection ship and … recognize their history and heritage,” she adds. Administrators are now transforming the Desert On February 26, 2019, Grand Canyon The company, which built a general store at Grand View area into a cultural heritage site. National Park celebrates its 100th anniversary. Canyon Village in 1925, built new stores at Desert View And what of the future? Today, park facilities face To mark the occasion, we dug into the archive in 1966 and the Mather Business Zone in 1969, then more than $300 million in deferred maintenance. One and pulled out some of our favorite stories. donated its original store to the Park Service. In 1999, the of the most pressing priorities is the aging water pipe- Was $29.99 Now $19.49 (plus shipping and handling) #AAGC8 company sold its Grand Canyon properties to Delaware line, which has logged more than 80 breaks since 2010. North, which today manages some of the South Rim Repairs cost more than $35 million annually, the Park concessions. Service says — and the cost of replacing the pipeline Janet Balsom, who has lived and worked in the park would exceed $100 million. for 35 years, likens the Grand Canyon’s past to the The Grand Canyon is an amazing place that speaks history of the country. Both are marked by westward to the past, present and future, Balsom says. And expansion, the coming of the railroad, exploration and there’s only one of it. Echoing Teddy Roosevelt, she says exploitation, and the rise of auto culture. the question is simple: “How can we best protect its “It’s not all great history,” the senior adviser to resources in a way that leaves them for future genera- Order online at www.shoparizonahighways.com or call 800-543-5432. the park’s superintendent admits, because it largely tions?” USE PROMO CODE P9B5GC WHEN ORDERING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS SPECIAL OFFER. OFFER EXPIRES FEBRUARY 28, 2019 .

14 FEBRUARY 2019

GCNP Centennial Book AD_0219.indd 6 11/26/18 2:38 PM Shadows shroud the layered buttes of the Grand Canyon beneath a starry sky. Shane McDermott

100 YEARS OF GRAND 100TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION MAPPING GRAND CANYON NATURALIZATION CEREMONY GRAND CANYON STAR PARTY Through 2019, online February 26, South Rim CONFERENCE April 16, South Rim June 22-29, South and North Rims February 28 and March 1, Tempe The park has partnered with the libraries At the visitors center, enjoy some birth- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services The Canyon is home to some of the at Arizona State University and Northern day cake and sign the park’s birthday This Arizona State University event will partner with the park to welcome country’s darkest night skies, and park THE EVENTS OF Arizona University to publicly share, for card. In the evening, speakers will explores the art, science and practice new United States citizens from a num- visitors can experience them via free the first time, thousands of high-quality talk about the important relationship of Grand Canyon cartography via map- ber of different countries. The time and nightly telescope viewing and astronomy photos and documents from the Can- between the Grand Canyon and the based storytelling, demonstrations, location of the ceremony had not yet programs. Jupiter and Saturn will be yon’s early history. Information: park’s 11 traditionally associated tribes. hands-on activities and more. It’s free been determined at press time. Informa- highlights this year, weather permitting. https://lib.asu.edu/grand100 Information: www.nps.gov/grca and open to the public, but registration is tion: www.nps.gov/grca Information: www.nps.gov/grca THE CENTURY required. Information: https://lib.asu.edu BY NOAH AUSTIN GRAND CANYON STEAM SATURDAY /mapping-grand-canyon-conference EARTH DAY CELEBRATION NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY SYMPOSIUM February 26, Williams/South Rim April 20, South Rim HERITAGE CELEBRATIONS Throughout 2019, Grand Canyon February 20-23, South Rim GRAND CANYON STATE August 8 and 9 (North Rim), A handful of times a year, the Grand This year’s celebration features informa- National Park and other locations March 2 and 3, Tucson November 9 and 10 (South Rim) are hosting special events to mark the This Grand Canyon Historical Society Canyon Railway offers service to the tion about park conservation efforts, park’s centennial. Here are just some event brings together historians, histori- South Rim via a steam-powered loco- The Tucson Symphony Orchestra marks including recycling, composting, dark Numerous tribes maintain strong cultural of them. To see an updated calendar, cal figures, park employees and others motive. This excursion, which leaves the park’s centennial with a selection of skies and more. Visitors can participate ties to the Grand Canyon, and these two visit the park’s website, www.nps.gov with a passion for the Canyon’s history. Williams at 9:30 a.m., is timed to coin- music that includes Ferde Grofé’s Grand in litter cleanups throughout the park. events honor those connections. Special /grca. Event dates and details are Events will be held at Shrine of the Ages cide with the park’s centennial celebra- Canyon Suite (see page 52), the piece of April 20 is also a National Park Service programs focus on ethnobotany, Native subject to change. Auditorium and other South Rim loca- tion. Information: www.thetrain.com music most closely associated with the fee-free day in honor of National Park American music and dance, and the Can- tions. Information: www.grandcanyon natural wonder. Information: www.tucson Week, so no entrance fee will be charged. yon’s tribal history. Information: history.org symphony.org Information: www.nps.gov/grca www.nps.gov/grca

16 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 17 POINT OF VIEW An essay by Charles Bowden

Rainbows form at the Grand Canyon during a sunset monsoon storm, as viewed from the South Rim. Guy Schmickle

18 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 19 EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay was originally published in our June 2007 issue. Chuck was a longtime contributor to Arizona Highways. When we needed words, he gave us the very best. Sadly, we lost Chuck on August 30, 2014. The void remains, but his words are as wonderful today as the day he first penned them.

iñon pine and juniper stand black in the gray light as the Earth 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, on average a mile first feeble licks of dawn seep into the eastern sky. The deep. There’s one number I keep repeating like a prayer and road is more rock than anything else, the air clear and yet can never comprehend: All the rivers in the world total silent. Yesterday, at the south entrance to Grand Canyon 300 cubic miles of water, but in the Grand Canyon one river has National Park, the line of cars reached back more than moved 800 cubic miles of material in creating this big hole. P 2 miles. I’m 20 miles west of there and alone except for What we see at these viewpoints lining the Grand Canyon the three cow elk that stand by the road and one spike bull depends on what we bring to the rim. And we see more if we that seems like a giant statue as I grind past. The ravens now go to those obscure places, the ones with primitive roads and slowly emerge from the darkness and fill the beginning of the no facilities, because then we face this warp and woof of time day with their croaks. alone and in silence with only the bubbling of love and memory South Bass Point suddenly snaps into view. That is the to keep us company. The camera stays in the case, there is no enduring quirk of the Canyon, the thing that has stunned peo- guardrail, or signs. Nothing protects us from ourselves or this ple for centuries — you never see it coming. There is rock, old wound in the Earth that harbors the bones of all our ancestors, grayed limbs and trunks of fallen juniper and pine, a maze of plant and animal, and their ways and dreams. Time stops, lit- forest, blue sky, and suddenly the world ends and there is this erally. The sun seems to move across the sky, but this is little huge hole in the heart of the planet. Every approach to the Can- noticed. Birds sweep through the trees, a blue mist hangs over yon means rolling through tablelands, flat ground with scrub the Canyon, and the slot of the Inner Gorge winds its way far or trees, nothing that would suggest the chasm waiting nearby. below. At some points the actual river can be seen, and with- At South Bass, the stone remnants of an old cabin stare one out exception, I always think I can hear the water moving a ity with words. There is a part of me that thinks that no one Small pools of water mirror the sky at Yuma Point, a Grand Canyon overlook in the face. The trailhead down to the river slips off the rim. mile below. should write a word about the Canyon, or take a photograph, along the South Rim’s Boucher Trail, at sunrise. Elias Butler William Wallace Bass came here in 1884 to cure an illness. He Sometimes I bring a book. At Bass Rapid I once knocked or paint a picture. And I believe this — even though at this stayed, had a family, raised kids, carved a trail to the river, put off a scientific study of passenger pigeons. At Lees Ferry, the very instant I am violating this belief as I write — because the to the rim, and below is Bass Rapid, a place I once sat for days in a cableway across the Colorado, carved a trail on the north starting point of the Canyon where the Paria River ripples into Canyon is like great music, within the reach of everyone and and days. The trail on the North Rim leading down to the river side up to that rim, had mines, even got a strata in the Canyon the Colorado, I finished Carl Sandburg’s massive study of Abra- beyond the comprehension of anyone. We can feel it but we is a jumble of boulders and then the chaos of a streambed. It named after him and was part of the beginning of the tourist ham Lincoln. But eventually, the book is set aside. That is the can never say it. was winter that time and ice formed on the water. The Canyon industry in this area. Now his home ground is silence, and for moment I crave, when time stops, when the world as I know from Prospect Point becomes a well of memory for me. I stand me, a trigger to memory as I stare down at the Inner Gorge it falls away and when I think but do not think, that state of he road spins through scrub, then hits stands of big pon- in the sun and yet feel the fresh flakes of snow from that long- where the Colorado River churns at Bass Rapid. mind I imagine Zen monks savor in those manicured rock derosas, and finally slips into Prospect Canyon, a place ago winter trek. At my feet are gnarled silver limbs of piñon. Once, I clambered off the North Rim and went down to Bass gardens where they contemplate the depths of life. There is no named by two 19th century men looking for the bonanza. Some almost seem to twirl as if a giant hand warped them into Rapid, the ground below the rim spread as an emerald-green machine noise, no car doors clunking shut, no engines turn- I’m on the Hualapai Reservation, a long way west of South sinuous curves. smear of life. Now I stand on the South Rim and look into my ing over, no radio, no speech, save the song of birds. And the Bass Point. The dirt track goes on and on for more than I’m alone. But that is the point of seeking isolated places on past and the past of everything else that has ever lived. It’s all breeze boiling up out of the Canyon itself. At Toroweap, hours T20 miles and I see no one. Five spike mule deer bound out the rim of the Grand Canyon — to find that aloneness, and in the strata, there right in front of me, hundreds of millions of bad road lead to groves of trees and then a 3,000-foot cliff of the way, groups of juvenile ravens explode before my eyes. when you do, then you realize you are never alone because of years of life and finally, that dark rock called Precambrian, where the Earth seems cut as if by a knife. A column of stone glows yellow by the road, the Canyon walls these ribbons of time, those captured in the strata and those stone that hails from the beginning of planet time itself and I have a tiny camp stove for making coffee, and I am always narrow and then widen. Mile after mile I follow a lane amid embedded in your own life, these soft ribbons of life wrap is almost 2 billion years old. Color codes time itself — cream, stunned by the roar it makes and blessed by the curtain of the trees, then the Canyon opens and sagebrush takes part of around you and suddenly you have no schedule, you are not on grayish white, yellow, white, rust red, red, tan, purple, a pro- silence that rolls out the instant I turn it off. Each time I use it the landscape. I climb up onto a ridge to the left, the stone slab the way to somewhere, you are where you began and where cession of tints and pigments — a clock made like a rainbow. I am appalled, as if the mayhem of modern life had followed me that leads to the promontory. Now the road is rock, and winds you end and where all the places in between are found. Some- As a species, we tend to walk to the edge of the Grand Can- as a stowaway disguised in this piddling stove. Maybe that’s on the edge of a burned-over area, the blackened skeletons of times they call the place South Bass, or Prospect Point, or yon, look, and then not know what to do. The names of forma- the reason I bring it — so that the roar of the burner will make trees standing like scarecrows across the landscape. Suddenly North Bass, or Toroweap or a dozen other off-the-beaten-path tions roll off the lips in close-order drill — Kaibab, Toroweap, the silence all that much more delicious when I turn it off. on the left, the world falls away. I park and walk over through fingers of stone reaching into the big chasm. Coconino, Hermit, Supai, Redwall, Muav, Bright Angel, Tapeats Viewpoints are a curious product of the human mind. We the pines and stand on the rim. The Earth below feels remote The view can be huge, like here. Or the view can be little, — on and on as the mind spins ever deeper into time. And then insist there are promontories that enable us to see more. and everything is buttes, plateaus and wind. I’m miles from like at Lees Ferry where you glance downstream and suddenly a jay clatters in the nearby piñon and the mind returns to the I doubt this very much. Every inch of the rim brings to our Prospect Point, but I linger. The stone is cool, to the west the air realize the Earth is opening itself up to human eyes for close to immediate moment as the eye floats over the Canyon. Numbers eyes more than we will ever understand, and yet at the same hangs blue, an enchanted mist hanging over the benches and 300 miles. hardly help at those places we call vistas because the numbers instant, everything we see we understand at some deep level spires of the Canyon. But the view is always the same as you finally look into your- are too big. The mind must try to encompass a gouge in the within ourselves and this understanding is beyond our abil- I roll on and enter the forest clotting the promontory. I walk self and find you can live with what you see.

20 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 21 Not Just Any Old Place

Although Grand Canyon National Park is turning 100 this month,

Summer rainfall creates the natural wonder for which it’s named is a bit older — about 35 million years or a dreamy atmosphere at sunrise in the Grand Canyon. This view is from the North more. There are other big, old canyons in the world, including Tsangpo Canyon Rim, which sees only about 10 percent of Grand Canyon in Tibet, but there’s no canyon on Earth as beautiful as ours. National Park’s 6 million annual visitors. Adam Schallau A PORTFOLIO EDITED BY JEFF KIDA

22 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 23 EDITOR’S NOTE: When you’re working on a portfolio about a place as big as the Grand Canyon, at some point, you have to zero in. What’s more, when you’re editing a magazine that’s been featuring that canyon for almost 100 years, you have to work a little harder to find a new theme. For this special issue, Photo Editor Jeff Kida referred back to John Wesley Powell, the first person to attempt a detailed written description of the natural wonder.

“One might imagine that [the Grand Canyon] was intended for the library of the gods, and so it was. The shelves are not for books … but form the stony leaves of one great book.” “He who would read the language of the universe may dig out letters here and there, and with them spell words and read … in a slow and imperfect way, but still so as to understand a little, the story of creation.” “The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon — forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain.” “You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more dif- ficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of Paradise.”

— JOHN WESLEY POWELL

Cracks and textures form in a section of Bass formation, one of the Canyon’s numerous rock layers. The formation is named for William Wallace Bass, an influential Canyon pioneer. Wes Timmerman

24 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 25 “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

— HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ABOVE: The calm water of the Colorado River reflects the light of dawn. The river flows for 277 miles through Grand Canyon National Park, and it has an average depth of 40 feet and an average width of 300 feet in that stretch. Adam Schallau

RIGHT: Lightning strikes the Canyon’s North Rim during a summer monsoon storm, as viewed from the South Rim’s Yavapai Point. The small, pointed butte in the center is Isis Temple. Elias Butler

26 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 27 Lipan Point, on the South Rim, offers an early-morning panorama of the Canyon’s buttes and the Colorado River. This overlook is just west of Desert View Watchtower. Adam Schallau

28 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 29 “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

— MARK TWAIN

ABOVE: A weather phenomenon known as an inversion fills the Canyon with puffy clouds. An inversion occurs when cold air below the rim is trapped by a layer of warmer air. Adam Schallau

RIGHT: A full moon and the Milky Way light the night sky above Angels Window on the North Rim. The arch is visible on the way to Cape Royal, the southernmost North Rim overlook. Adam Schallau

30 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 31 An isolated beam of light shines on the Palisades of the Desert as the Colorado River meanders past at sunset. This area is in the eastern section of the park. Ralph Lee Hopkins

32 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 33 Textures emerge in a section of Brahma schist, one of the Grand Canyon’s oldest rock types. Exposed in the Inner Gorge, Brahma schist is about 1.75 billion years old. Wes Timmerman

A small waterfall trickles into Saddle Canyon, a tributary of Marble Canyon, in the northeastern part of the park. This spot is near Mile 47 on the Colorado River. Adam Schallau

34 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 35 Lightning from a spring storm strikes near the Canyon at sunset, as viewed from Toroweap Overlook. This remote North Rim viewpoint offers a view of the Colorado River 3,000 feet below. Peter Coskun

36 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 37 Deer Creek Falls feeds hanging greenery as it empties into the Colorado River near river Mile 137. Most commercial and private Canyon rafting trips stop at the 150-foot waterfall. Derek von Briesen

38 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 39 “travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

— GUSTAVE FLAUBERT The setting sun forms long shadows at the Canyon, as viewed from Cape Royal on the North Rim. Cape Royal offers 270-degree views, making it a popular destination for North Rim visitors. Peter Coskun

40 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 41 GO BY FOOT THROUGH THE FOREST AN ESSAY BY CRAIG CHILDS

Bison graze in a meadow near the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. The species was introduced to the area in the early 1900s. Adam Schallau

42 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 43 Sunset casts a pinkish glow on the Canyon’s layered buttes, as viewed from the North Rim. The San Francisco Peaks are visible in the distance. Gary Ladd

slowly (years, maybe), becoming disoriented and finding your way back. With no kiosks, National Park Service signs or trails not made by bison or mule deer, you move half-mile by half- mile, scouting down one draw and up another. Another option: You could drive to the edge of the North Rim on a rough dirt road, drop a tailgate and have a picnic over the glorious maze of the Grand Canyon from about 8,000 feet in elevation. But if walking is your thing, and you know some- one who can help you not become dismally lost, go by foot through the forest to get to the North Rim. It’s the proper way. This is the quieter side of the Canyon, front country and back. It’s farther from most civilized places and interstates. With a zenith of 9,200 feet in elevation, the Kaibab Plateau snows in every winter and the North Rim’s Grand Canyon Lodge, along with the road getting here, is closed. Trails are fewer on this side, views harder won. The South Rim is a thousand feet lower, putting you at eye level with the Canyon. What looks geologically inscrutable from the south, you can puzzle out from the North Rim — the difference between looking down on a labyrinth and looking across one. You want to believe there is a tip to every point on the North Rim, that you can walk to it and throw out your arms as if on the bow of a steamship. Some points end that way. Most don’t. Peninsulas crumble into limestone platforms and downsloping scree, thickets of locusts and gnarled, naked junipers left from wildfires decades ago. Draws that weave through forests on the Kaibab Plateau plunge into deeper and darker chutes until they launch over the Coconino palisades below, into the back of every massive canyon on this side of the Grand Canyon. The rim is where the forest ends and the planet opens wide, sky opening with it.

WE SLEPT IN THE MEADOW, under swiftly passing clouds and light rain. Morning smelled like a terrarium: fern glens and fallen aspen leaves, pine needles holding clear drops at their tips. Quick breakfast and to the ridge along the edge of the Canyon, where we walked a skinny curve of land, the Canyon falling away to THE FIRST MEADOW we came to was in a ring of ponderosa of feet below, as if timbering into the sea. like an anatomy lesson in front of us. Thrones and temples; Kai- either side. This peninsula is nameless, like most of the long, pines. Grass damp from rain lay halfway to the ground. The In this grassy, cool meadow strung down the bottom of a bab limestone down to Vishnu schist. forested arms on the north side. Burnt hulks of trees from forest hovered close. From the looks of the place — heavy draw, you wouldn’t have known the Canyon was out there. It Neither of the friends I came with had ever been to the fires decades ago stood like obsidian, a new forest sprung up woods intermixed with aspens in rolling hills and draws — felt as if we were in a forest that covers the world. The North Grand Canyon. It was a fault that needed fixing. I didn’t let around them. Our tents bloomed at the end of a mile-long arm we could have been anywhere from Alpine to the Mogollon Rim is dotted with gentle inland parks, narrow half football them walk out to the easier points near the road that took us covered in conifers, locust bushes and blackened trunks of old Rim. Only, if you followed this meadow and its draw down- fields of ferns and lone aspens. A hawk will fly from an old- into the park. I wanted this to be their first view: climbing up burns. stream, eventually it would narrow into a canyon before falling growth snag. You will walk into meadows, half a mile wide a hill slope and suddenly looking into a Technicolor cascade For two nights, we didn’t move camp from that spot, each through the North Rim into the Grand Canyon. and decorated with eroding blocks of ancient limestone, where of stone. They laughed in disbelief at what they saw: the Earth evening watching golden light fill the canyons around us. We The North Rim isn’t a rim, not like the edge of a bowl. It is it feels as if you’re wandering through Middle-Earth. caved in on itself, an entire horizon laid bare. At least once in a walked in every direction, leaving and approaching our neck a ragged coastline, its many peninsulas reaching for the Colo- Late in the day, at a good place to drop camp, we left packs lifetime, a person should gasp unexpectedly at the sight of the of a high point from different angles. We followed its benches rado River. Shell-shaped bays are scooped from the wooded in the meadow and climbed out of the draw with a map in North Rim. My friends were initiated. high and low, plumbed its wooded drainages, split up, went Kaibab Plateau, where a thousand square miles of ponderosas, hand. It helps to get up high and see where you are. At the top, alone and came back together in time for dinner. This is a way aspens and oaks spill down draws and slopes and over the through thorny locusts and pine cones, we broke into an inte- YOU WOULDN’T DO THIS IN A DAY. Three or four would be good. To come of learning a place: walking routes, climbing limestone escarp- edge, trunks shattered where they fall into canyons thousands rior rim. We saw exactly where we were, the Canyon splayed without a trail, I recommend approaching the North Rim ments, wandering among ponderosas. We scrambled out to

44 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 45 Wildflowers thrive in an aspen grove on the North Rim, which is colder than the South Rim and receives more precipitation. Shane McDermott

rim views as much as we traveled back into the woods. The North Rim is both forest and abyss. You can’t grasp one with- out the other. One of my friends started with his tent as far out of the woods as possible, overlooking the Canyon. The next day, he sheepishly pulled up stakes and moved his tent back into the ponderosas. All night, he said, it felt like he was falling. There’s no water up there, not where we were. The drips and seeps you’d use to fill bottles were another several hun- dred feet down inside the Canyon, through timber crevasses and loose boulders where my friend thought he might tumble. Thinking I might find water along the rim, I went off alone one afternoon, tracing a draw to where bedrock was exposed. I moved through a narrow museum of trees and undergrowth where you don’t walk, but crawl, climb, step over, try not to step on. It’s moister along shaded corridors like this, where vegetation tumbles to the bottom. I wasn’t finding anything other than moist soil. Nothing we could drink. Under fallen gray aspens lay the skull of an eight-point buck, a deer with its antlers, grown vertically like a candelabra, still rooted to bone. It was one of the biggest mule deer I’d seen. A year or two dead, and once the proudest creature in these woods, it still had a bristled crown of head fur between the antlers. Sentinel, I thought. A reason to pause upon entry into the grotto end of this draw. If water was anywhere, it would be along a bedrock over- hang. I climbed for it, and an owl startled me from its treetop perch in a mangled Douglas fir. Brindle-banded wings sailed overhead as it descended toward some other dim hole where it could wait out the day. That was my second sentinel. I was sure I’d find water. The route smelled like a cave: limestone boulders dappled in moss. It took me into a gaping bedrock mouth, the inside draped with maidenhair ferns, but no seeps to sip from. No water. I returned to camp empty-bottled.

CAPE ROYAL IS A GOOD START for the North Rim if you don’t have much a gap between passing conversations, listen into the Canyon of this rim: brilliant, golden October in the aspens; August century old. New trees, a full head of ponderosas, had grown time. Make it a slow walk. Pause at every gap in the trees that below. If the wind is not high, you will hear the roar of water. rocked with thunderstorms, evening horizons prickled with back in. A meadow lay wide open, ferns elbow-deep, bison you can see through. The trail is paved and takes 15 minutes. It is not the Colorado River — too far away to be audible — but lightning. Even if you don’t make it past Cape Royal, you will dung dropped like stones where old growth and first growth Side trails in dirt and duff lead to abrupt edges. Don’t lean out a spring creek plunging into a side canyon. It is the sound that have understood something about the North Rim. once were cut — remnants of an old forest. The largest of the too far. Sit on benches and boulders. Make an hour of it. Make gives magic to the Canyon. trees had been toppled, its length sawed into rounds ready for it two. Learn how the place works by using your eyes, tracing If you have another day, go for Cape Final, where you can WE WERE TOO LAZY to go over the rim looking for water. That would transport, but it never left, as if lumbermen saved this giant for the bottoms of canyons until they disappear into each other. look west into the arms of Marble Canyon and the great, have been an expedition, and we were here on vacation, a few last and cut it down to say it was done. The whole thing lay in Walk to the farthest point, with railings and travelers, from banded palisades on the opposite side. Or a day out and back days with backpacks, mapping a bit of rim for ourselves. To sections, 200 feet of ponderosa laid out like a derailed train. near and far away, all around you. Out on this limestone sea to Widforss Point, above a cruciferous layout of geologic faults refill our water for one more night out, we walked back to the We walked into the end of the most beautiful evening we’d stack, stay long enough to sense a change in the wind as Grand and stone temples. Both of these hikes go through miles of truck with empty packs. The truck was parked among forested seen. It wasn’t a grand view off the North Rim, but a gentle Canyon air rises and sinks into the day. Stay until new waves woods, with rims glimpsed between trees — a perfect way to dells and an old, locked-up wooden shack at the end of a four- valley filled with soft-leaf mulleins and late-day God lighting. of people arrive and leave, as shadows shrink and lengthen in approach the North Rim. wheel-drive road. No trails go out from here; no signs or hand- We were back in the forest that covers the world, no inkling the maze of temples below. A backpack and a trail can get you farther. Start picking rails. Most of the North Rim is like this. You could wander its that the Grand Canyon might be half a mile away. As much as If you have an evening after that, go out with the colorful nameless rims on maps, and learn ways in and out, routes draws and forested ridges for days and never see the Canyon. the North Rim is a towering rift in the Earth, it is what grows throngs to Bright Angel Point, at the foot of the massively tim- through the Kaibab and the Coconino, the top layers of rock in At the end of the day, coppery light falling into meadows, all around, meadows and woods crowded in. It is the place not bered Grand Canyon Lodge. Walk the paved narrows and, in the Canyon. Day by day, decade by decade, you will see more we moved through timber cuts that must have been half a so grand, the woods that come to the edge of the world.

46 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 47 Originally published in the September 1984 issue of Arizona Highways. THE CIRCUS HITS THE ROAD BY BIL KEANE

48 FEBRUARY 2019 VERY BRIDGE DESIGNER FACES CHALLENGES. But the Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge added a new level of difficulty. Completed in 1928, the 440-foot bridge spans the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. To reach it, workers had to hike 7 miles down the steep South Kaibab Trail, losing nearly a mile of elevation along the way. Because the trail was the only way to reach the Esite, every piece of the bridge had to be carried by a worker or LOW BRIDGE a pack animal — meaning no piece could be longer than 10 feet In 1928, construction workers put the final touches on what’s commonly known as the Black Bridge. As bridges or weigh more than 200 pounds. (Except the 550-foot suspen- go, it’s not the most beautiful, but considering it was built by hand a mile below the South Rim, sion cables, that is. Those 2,300-pounders were carried down the twisting trail by teams of 42 men, mostly Havasupais.) it’s very impressive. That’s why, this month, it’s being designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. Despite the obstacles, the Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge, more commonly known as the Black Bridge, became a Grand | BY NOAH AUSTIN | PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM BROWNOLD | Canyon institution. And in conjunction with the park’s centen- nial this month, it’s being honored as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark — one of only a handful in Arizona. The designation is a marriage of passions for Jonathan Upchurch, who authored the landmark nomination. A member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Upchurch has hiked some 2,400 miles in the Canyon since he first visited in 1961. He also lived at the South Rim for six years and became famil- iar with Grand Canyon National Park’s history and culture. Upchurch notes that when the Black Bridge was completed, it was the only Colorado River crossing in the 754-mile stretch between Moab, Utah, and Needles, California. Even today, it OPPOSITE PAGE: A tunnel on the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail and the nearby Bright Angel Bridge, also known as the Silver leads to the Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge, which was completed in 1928 and spans the Colorado River. Bridge, are the only crossings in the 340 miles between Navajo ABOVE: Of the two river bridges in the Canyon, the Black Bridge is the Bridge and Hoover Dam. But the Silver Bridge, built in the only one designed for mule traffic. 1960s to carry the Trans-Canyon Pipeline across the river, had the benefit of more modern technology — namely, helicopters thy of National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark to get equipment and bridge pieces to the bottom of the Can- designation. In Arizona, Hoover Dam and Navajo yon. (Additionally, that bridge, unlike the Black Bridge, wasn’t Bridge already have that honor, as do Theodore Roo- designed to support mule traffic.) sevelt Dam, the prehistoric Hohokam canal system in The Black Bridge “is very remote, and the topography is the Salt River Valley, and two aqueducts that carry extreme,” Upchurch says. “In the 1920s, those two factors very water from the Colorado River into California. strongly influenced the design and the construction. It had On February 23, during the Grand Canyon History to be designed in pieces that were small in size and not too Symposium, Upchurch plans to give a presentation heavy.” It also needed to be more durable than its predecessor, at the South Rim’s Shrine of the Ages on the Black which was completed in 1921 and was prone to wind damage. Bridge’s history and construction. If the Canyon’s In all, workers and pack animals took 122 tons of materials and unpredictable weather cooperates, there also will supplies down the trail. And once they had the pieces, workers be an outdoor dedication: A landmark plaque with had to build a bridge that was the first of its kind: As Upchurch a 99-word citation will be installed near the Yavapai notes in the landmark nomination, at the time of construction, Geology Museum, at a spot where the bridge is visible. the National Park Service could find no record of another trail “It serves as another interpretive wayside for visitors bridge this long. to the park, to help them understand the history of The bridge furthered the growth of Phantom Ranch and the park,” Upchurch says. “In a more general sense, it allowed hikers to safely reach the North Rim from the South helps the public to understand the field of civil engi- Rim, and today, it’s estimated that some 100,000 people cross it neering and what it’s all about.” annually. It also influenced the design of the Verde River Sheep Another plaque will go near the bridge, but fewer Bridge, a similar structure north of the Phoenix area. These people are likely to see that one. As the bridge’s build- and other factors, Upchurch says, make the Black Bridge wor- ers would tell you, it’s a long way down.

50 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 51 GRAND CANYON SUITE By Ferde Grofé

Originally published in the December 1938 issue of Arizona Highways.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In 1917, a piano player from Los Angeles made his first trip to Arizona. Like so many visitors, he eventually headed north to watch the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. A decade later, he began work on what would become known as the Grand Canyon Suite. The now-iconic piece was completed in 1931 and was first performed that same year by Paul White- man and his orchestra at the Studebaker Theatre in Chicago. In 1938, the composer wrote about how his masterpiece came to be.

HERE ARE THINGS IN THIS WORLD which we love passingly, or long, or always, and that applies particularly to persons and places. It is to such a place that I dedicate this article with all the love and gratitude in my heart. The place I mean is large, very large, but I think that I know most of it, as well as the best of it (to me there is no worst) and border Mexico, at Slaughter’s Ranch. A troop of Tit has become an abiding part of my fondest memories. There I treasure my I FIRST WENT TO ARIZONA IN 1917, when Mexicans seized me and took me to Agua Prieta. ABOVE: Ferde Grofé, shown in recollections of the place I am writing about; recollections sentimental, picto- the war urge sent me to volunteer for the cavalry On the way I tried to put on a bold front, but felt an undated photo, composed rial, romantic; recollections of grandiose Nature, of vast areas, of eloquent band in Douglas. I played the baritone, and my none too good when I remembered that I had no numerous orchestral works, solitudes, towering heights, silent deserts, rushing rivers, wild animal life; of practice hours were spent on the desert, much to passport, and not even a hunting license. Duly film scores and other pieces health-giving ozone, magic dawns and resplendent sunsets; silvery moonshine, the relief of my neighbors in the city! Then came of music over a career that I was arraigned at Mexican headquarters in an spanned more than 60 years. iridescent colorings of skies and rocks; and before all else, of a stock of men and the draft, and I had to return to Los Angeles to open square, and from the voluble palaver and Library of Congress women who breathe deeply and freely, live bravely and picturesquely, speak report. glowering looks of my captors I gathered that OPPOSITE PAGE: Grofé’s best- their minds in simplicity and truth, and altogether represent as typical and fine Before that, however, exciting adventure things were going none too well for me. Visions known work is 1931’s Grand a human flowering as this land of ours has inherited from its great pioneer days. stalked me in Douglas, when I temporarily of a firing squad filled my mind, and I was won- Canyon Suite — which, in turn, is the music most associated with If you have read this far, and not guessed the name of the place I am eulogizing, exchanged the baritone for the gun, went on dering to whom to bequeath my scanty belong- the Canyon. let me relieve your mind. I mean Arizona. a hunting trip, and unknowingly strayed into ings when a big Packard car rolled up, and out

52 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 53 stepped a brilliantly uniformed Mexican General, whom to my they were epitomized, before all else, in the awe-inspiring our knowledge to a better sort of orchestration for popular record of a terrific electrical storm I encountered in Arizona. intense happiness I recognized as an occasional visitor to the magnificence and towering mystery of the Grand Canyon, music. Paul encouraged me to experiment along that line, and Then providence aided, for a similar watery deluge, with thun- Douglas café where I had been doing some professional piano- which always had stimulated my imagination to tonal impres- to try my hand at various kinds of innovations. I worked out der and lightning, raged before my eyes during a visit to the playing. I remembered that the General applauded my perfor- sions. I saw color, but I “heard” it, too. new ideas, and to meet them, Paul gradually changed the Chippewa Indian Reservation. Immediately Cloudburst took mances, and had sent me requests to do some of the operatic instrumentation of his band to the type that later became the shape and soon was transferred to paper, as the conclusion of melodies he liked. I pushed my guard aside, rushed over to real jazz combination. We abandoned the huddle system of the Grand Canyon Suite. the General, and pantomimed an imitation of piano-playing, JUST HERE LET ME DIGRESS to set forth briefly my previ- everybody playing together all the time, featured solos, and Its world’s premiere took place November 22, 1931, in Chi- saying Rigoletto, Lucia, Faust, Traviata. Suddenly he smiled, ous musical background, as it may help to explain my approach took the saxophone into our orchestral family. Our new offer- cago, with Paul Whiteman conducting, and I trust that I shall nodded affirmatively, and appeared to ask the nature of the to the mighty subject I had ambitiously chosen for transfer- ings were piquant and dancy, and made an instantaneous hit. not be considered as lacking in modesty if I add that the com- charges against me. Satisfied that I was not a spy or in any ence into orchestral expression. Born in New York, I was I have since been called “the father of jazz instrumentation,” position scored impressive success, and since then has been way endangering the safety of Mexico, the General gave some only a few months old when I was taken to California by my and I suppose that I really represent that more or less illegiti- performed all over the world. curt orders, wrote a release, had my confiscated gun returned parents, and so from early childhood my sympathies were mate parenthood. Of course, the usual critics arose here and there to put me to me, and appointed an escort to take me back to the United Western in spite of my Eastern derivation. My later destiny In the strictly jazz idiom, I imagine that my best known in my place, and I remember especially one who objected to States line. We separated with mutual bows, and if I had been shaped itself through the heritage coming from maternal child is the scoring of the late lamented George Gershwin’s the fact that I did not orchestrate the work in the accepted a Mexican, I would have kissed him on both cheeks. grandfather Bernard Bielich, who occupied the first cello Rhapsody in Blue, which he first brought to me in the form of a fashion set by European composers! He said that the new type After the war, I lived in Arizona at different periods in 1918, desk at the Metropolitan Opera House together with Victor pencil manuscript for piano solo. It was at that time the longest of American orchestration “did violence to the grandeur of the ’19, ’20, ’21 and ’23. I was familiar with the Prescott rodeos, Herbert. Subsequently my ancestor became solo cellist of the jazz composition that had been orchestrated, and my dominant Grand Canyon,” and that “it is a fitting subject only for the made frequent visits to the Grand Canyon, camped everywhere Los Angeles Orchestra, where my uncle, Julius, functioned purpose was to fill it with uncommon instrumental variety greatest of symphony writers.” The greatest of symphony writ- from the border to Mohave County, felt at home in Flagstaff as concertmaster. My mother, too, played the cello, had been and coloring. In 1924 I retired from the Whiteman band as ers were Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms, and as none and Tombstone, the State ranches, mining camps; I hobnobbed a pupil of the great Klengel at the Leipsic Conservatory, and pianist and arranger, and devoted my time to some conducting of them ever was in Arizona, I do not quite see how they could with Indians, did some gold-prospecting with an old friend, gave me my primary musical education. Dad was right in the of my own; but chiefly to scoring, arranging, transcribing, and have done musical justice to the Grand Canyon. The same critic who at one time controlled an interest in the famous Ivanpaw spirit, with previous activity as a singer, serving in the famous composing. In the last-named field my record includes the Mis- contradicted himself, however, when he went on: “The Grand Mine in the Hualapai Mountains; often heard the Indians’ light opera organization, The Bostonians, which premiered sissippi Suite, Metropolis, Southern Rhapsody, Hollywood Suite, and Canyon is a place of a thousand cathedrals, suggesting graphi- drums beating all night during their pow-wows; had some such works as Robin Hood, The Serenade, The Fortune Teller, and Grand Canyon. cally the stupendous scope and majesty and beauty of this ownership in the New Jersey Mining Company at Chloride; other hits of their day. I have related the foregoing in order to give you an idea of natural wonder. But we do not doubt that Grofé could write formed a partnership in several hundred head of livestock with Well, it was decided by my elders that the family had the preliminaries to the genesis of my Grand Canyon music, and Whiteman could play a description even of St. Peter’s in a cattleman and got to know the packing-houses and their enough professional musicians, and so my first real jobs were which, once the idea to compose it had me in its grip, seemed ‘symphonic jazz,’ that would meet with great acclaim.” methods of slaughter and dressing; fished the Colorado River those of bank clerk, printer, and bookbinder. But nothing of to call for a tonal language not that of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, On the other hand, I like to recall the opinion of the Chicago or even symphonic moderns, but for a truly American idiom, critic who wrote, “That Donkey Motif of Grofé’s is the most falling easily into the average ear, and completely understand- intriguing bit of music these old ears have heard in 20 years.” “Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, with its almost nonstop musical effects, able by ordinary Mr. and Mrs. John Citizen and even their And then there was the generous letter of my fellow composer, communicates an infectious passion for the beauty of the untouched American West. adolescent offspring. Whether or not I have succeeded, I leave the late Raymond Hubbell: “Irvin Cobb looked over the edge of It’s become an international postcard.” it to others to judge. the Grand Canyon and said, ‘God made it, but he didn’t make any words to describe it.’ May I rephrase that, and remark, — Theresa Schiavone, National Public Radio ‘God made it and now he has given Ferde Grofé music to THE GRAND CANYON SUITE HAS FIVE MOVEMENTS: describe it!’ This is the greatest job done by any modern com- above Needles; experienced marvelous floods; spent wonderful that kind worked. If some domestic animals are subject to the (1) Sunrise, (2) Painted Desert, (3) On the Trail, (4) Sunset, poser, and it sent the cold chills up and down my spine.” nights on the desert; and rode all over the state in a cut-down call of the wild, I could not escape the call of music. It got me, (5) Cloudburst. Strange as it may seem, I did not write the An outstanding New York critic also made me happy when Ford roadster. Do you wonder that I had by that time consid- and got me good. Soon I was a traveling pianist, doing itiner- movements in that order, except that I started with Sunrise, for my opus was first-timed there, with his praise of my “coloring, ered myself almost a native Arizonan? ant playing in various California communities, including one in which I made the first sketches at Santa Monica, California, in melody, imagination, and instrumentation of evocative atmo- Recalling the desert, I remember when I broke down there which necessity forced me to tickle the keyboard in the saloon 1929, and finished it later at my home in Teaneck, N.J. I next sphere. Grofé actually gives you the spirit of the Grand Canyon, in my Ford, and had to make my own repairs, no small mat- of a mining camp. But nostalgia overcame me, and to get the (also in 1929) did Sunset, at the Saddle River Country Club, near its gorgeous beauty, its vastness, its part in the Indian history ter for an unmechanical musician, and by the way, in those price of a ticket for home, I gave a “recital” in the saloon! It Hackensack, N.J. Now followed On the Trail, which became of the Southwest.” days one traveled Arizona with a so-called “strip-map,” which was a lengthy affair during which the primary business of the the “best seller” of the series, and engaged my leisure when Every composer’s output generally includes one number meant that the only guides were landmarks like a certain farm, establishment was forgotten. When the last bibulous “music I was a member of the Whiteman band in Chicago during 1931. which is most dear to his heart, perhaps because he considers tree, fork of some stream, watermill, giant cactus, or ranch- lover” left, at 5 a.m., he presented me with two silver dollars. The theme of the burros, which struck the popular fancy so it his best, or maybe because of the cherished associations in house. There were few signposts, and the roads were of the Exactly two hours and thirteen minutes later, I was on the strongly, came to me while wheeling my son along Sheridan the music. In my case, that favored example is the Grand Can- dirt and unimproved variety. To follow the strip-map correctly, train, bound for Los Angeles. Road. Five pile-drivers were thumping in some building opera- yon Suite, and for both of the reasons I have mentioned. It is my it was only necessary to set the speedometer at so many miles, There I occasionally played the viola in the local symphony tion, and their peculiar broken rhythm at once suggested its fervent hope that I may be able to do something to rank with it. and then at given points to look for the indicated landmarks orchestra, but often traveled to other localities and appeared adaptability for musical use, recollection of the metrical hoof- But where is there such another subject to move me similarly? I have just described. Old-timers will smile reminiscently with popular instrumental groups performing in hotels, the- tap which I had heard so often from the little beasts of burden Do you wonder that my heart is filled with enduring love and with me, now that we know the modern touring facilities of aters and dance-halls. In 1919, after one of my Arizona sojourns, in Arizona. For Painted Desert (1931, Chicago) I went again to lasting gratitude for Arizona and its grandest glory? Arizona, with its exact maps and perfected great highways. I joined John Tait’s orchestra in a famous San Francisco resort, memories, and envisioned a scene at Holbrook, where I had Believe me when I say that I am looking forward to the However, as the saying has it, “them was the days,” and there and dissatisfied with the thin arrangement he used, I first been on the rim of the desert at early morn and gazed in rapt time when I shall have a small ranch of my own, not far from are many of us with whom they linger affectionately in memory. tried my hand at improving them with characteristic changes amazement at the changing colors and shadows. The fifth Flagstaff and my beloved Grand Canyon country, where I may My last extended visit to Arizona was in 1926, and on that of my own. A year later I was a member of Paul Whiteman’s movement of Cloudburst had me guessing for a while, in order re-live my younger days in the great open, and find a finale of occasion came to me the irresistible impulse to put into music first orchestra in Los Angeles. Like myself, he had enjoyed to find the impressive dynamic effects I desired for Nature peace that passeth understanding. So, let the day arrive soon what I felt about the State and its wonders of Nature. To me symphony training, but we both were interested in applying at its utmost fury, even though I had in mind a vivid mental when I may sing, “Arizona, here I come!”

54 FEBRUARY 2019 www.arizonahighways.com 55 THE LAST PAGE GO WEST AND WALK THE SKY. FEEL THE POWER OF NATURE WITH BREATHTAKING VIEWS!

All Aboard! This Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway advertisement appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1910 — nine years after the company began rail ser- vice to the Grand Canyon, and five years after it opened El Tovar at the South Rim. Since the Canyon was not yet a national park, the ranger portrayed here is actually a Fred Harvey trail guide. In 1901, a train trip from Williams to the South Rim cost $3.95 — the equivalent of about $120 today. As automobiles became more popular, rail travel to the Canyon declined, and the Santa Fe discontinued passenger service to the South Rim in the late 1960s. The rail line, now known as the Grand Canyon Railway, has since been revived and is operated by Xanterra Parks and Resorts, one of the park’s concessioners.

888-868-WEST (9378) find us on 56 FEBRUARY 2019 PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK MUSEUM COLLECTION