THE GRAND CANYON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS

The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Canyon, and the western slope between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.

Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of 2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but with pictographs resembling the ancient Phoenician signs from which our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed the canyons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet high in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of Montezuma’s Castle and Montezuma’s Well, or go yet farther afield to the Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge meteorite.

Of the Grand Canyon little need be said here; not because there is nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole length of the Grand Canyon-200 miles-and hundreds of the lesser canyons that strike off sidewise from Grand Canyon are still unexplored and unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in from San Diego, you are in a poor-man’s paradise so far as a camp holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canyon and 100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National Forests are not the People’s Playground of all America; that they do not belong to the East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned in maintaining and protecting them?

You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to another-both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from $1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made, with the greatest ease in a day.

Don’t go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big knock-you-down variety! To go from the spacious glories of the boundless Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is like passing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery, London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go looking for “big” things you’ll come away disappointed; but if like Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, “the flower in the crannied wall” has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you’ll come away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in the Painted Desert.

In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic, sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light, when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle. Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, “Why, look, that’s a tree!” and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants must be séquoias of the same ancient family as California’s groves of big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand. The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are unknown. Only water-oceans and aeons of water-could have rolled and swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.

But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands, caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks. Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard, fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the petrified wood was exploited commercially and shipped away in carloads to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.

You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a prone giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130 feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an emperor’s throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a child-picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into colored diamonds.

I said don’t go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every single bit of rock is ashine with the colors of broken rainbows; or go there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of light-there is something the matter with you if you don’t have a big thrill with a capital “B.”

There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don’t. All these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was a No-Man’s-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana, was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert Potter of the Forestry Department, Washington, who rescued Sheriff Woods of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days. Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000 worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and Scott and Wilson-mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses which they didn’t steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you’ll not lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You’ll find your way in, if you know how; and if you don’t know how, no man can teach you. And at Adamana, don’t forget to see the pictograph rocks. Then you’ll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.

Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the gateway to many Aztec ruins-much more easily accessible to the public than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon. These differ from the Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable precipices and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation. The debris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice into Walnut Canyon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the debris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes’ scratching over of one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum shell that from the perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling gray stone canyons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff houses-hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark canyon was evidently once a stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race; and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.

Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma’s Castle and Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6 a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle and the Well, where you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.

It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a ranch house in a cool canyon where health and holiday seekers can stay all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month as it now has between 100 and 200.

When you reach the Grand Canyon, you have come to the uttermost wonder of the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America. There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Canyon and gone away disappointed. If the Grand Canyon were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who yearly throng Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.

You can do the Canyon cheaply, or you can do it extravagantly. You can go to it by driving across the Painted Desert, 200 miles; or motoring in from Flagstaff-a half-day trip; or by train from Williams, return ticket something more than $5. Or you can take your own pack horses, and ride in yourself; or you can employ one of the well known local trail makers and guides, like John Bass, and go off up the Canyon on a camping trip of weeks or months.

Once you reach the rim of the Canyon, you can camp under your own tent roof and cater your own meals. Or you may go to the big hotel and pay $4 to $15 a day. Or you may get tent quarters at the Bright Angel Camp-$1 a day, and whatever you pay for your meals. Or you may join one of John Bass’ Camps which will cost from $4 up, according to the number of horses and the size of your party.

First of all, understand what the Grand Canyon is, and what it isn’t. We ordinarily think of a canyon as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks, seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very seldom more than a few miles long. The Grand Canyon is nearly as long as from New York to Canada, as wide as the city of New York is long, and as deep straight as a plummet as the Canadian Rockies or lesser Alps are high. In other words, it is 217 miles long, from thirteen to twenty wide, and has a straight drop a mile deep, or seven miles as the trail zigzags down. You think of a canyon as a great trench between mountains. This one is a colossal trench with side canyons going off laterally its full length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone. Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot mountain, you have to go up. At the Grand Canyon, you come to the brink of the sagebrush plain and jump off-to climb these peaks. Peak after peak, you lose count of them in the mist of primrose fire and lilac light and purpling shadows. To climb these peaks, you go down, down 7,000 feet a good deal steeper than the ordinary stair and in places quite as steep as the Metropolitan Tower elevator. In fact, if the Metropolitan Tower and the Singer Building and the Flatiron and Washington’s Shaft in the Capital City were piled one on top of another in a pinnacled pyramid, they would barely reach up one-seventh of the height of these massive peaks swimming in countless numbers in the color of the Canyon.

So much for dimensions! Now as to time. If you have only one day, you can dive in by train in the morning and out by night, and between times go to Sunrise Point or-if you are a robust walker-down Bright Angel Trail to the bank of the Colorado River, seven miles. If you have two days at your disposal, you can drive out to Grand View-fourteen miles-and overlook the panorama of the Canyon twenty miles in all directions. If you have more days yet at your disposal, there are good trips on wild trails to Dripping Springs and to Gertrude Point and to Cataract Canyon and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the Kaibab Plateau on the other side. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand Canyon a year and were not afraid of trailless trips, you could find a new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember that the Canyon itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral canyons uncounted.

When you reach El Tovar you are told two of the first things to do are take the drives-three miles each way-to Sunrise and to Sunset Points. Don’t! Save your dollars, and walk them both. By carriage, the way leads through the pine woods back from the rim for three miles to each point. By walking, you can keep on an excellent trail close to the rim and do each in twenty minutes; for the foot trails are barely a mile long. Also by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. In fact, if you keep looking long enough through that lilac fire above seas of primrose mists, you can almost fancy those hoary old gods of Beauty and Power floating round angles of the massive lower mountains, shifting the scenes and beckoning one another from the wings of this huge amphitheater. The space-filling talker is still bawling out about “the mighty powers of erosion”; and a thin-faced curate is putting away a figure of speech about “Almighty Power” for his next sermon. Personally, I prefer the old pagan way of expressing these things in the short cut of a personifying god who did a smashing big business with the hammer of Thor, or the sea horses of Neptune or the forked lightnings of old loud-thundering Jove.

You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the Canyon; but unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the knees, you’ll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the way down is steep as a stair and the distance is seven miles. In that case, better spend the night at the camp known as the Indian Gardens halfway down in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regular daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or you can join the regular tourist party both going down and coming up. Mainly because we wanted to see the sunrise, but also because a big party on a narrow trail is always unsafe and a gabbling crowd on a beautiful trail is always agony, two of us rose at four A. M. and walked down the trail during sunrise, leaving orders for a special guide to fetch mules down for us to the river. Space forbids details of the tramp, except to say it was worth the effort, twice over worth the effort in spite of knees that sent up pangs and protests for a week.

It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if rain brings out the colors of the Petrified Forests, you can imagine what it does to sunrise in a sea of blood-red mountain peaks. Much of the trail is at an angle of forty-five degrees; but it is wide and well shored up at the outer edge. The foliage lining the trail was dripping wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf in spangles of gold. An incense as of morning worship filled the air with the odor of cedars and cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds below the Canyon rim than above it; and the dawn was filled with snatches of song from bluebirds and yellow finches and water ousels, whose notes were like the tinkle of pure water. What looked like a tiny red hillock from the rim above is now seen to be a mighty mountain, four, five, seven thousand feet from river to peak, with walls smooth as if planed by the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between these peaks would be dignified by the names of canyons. Here, they are mere wings to the main stage setting of the Grand Canyon. We reached the Indian Garden’s Camp in time for breakfast and rested an hour before going on down to the river. The trail followed a gentle descent over sand-hills and rocky plateaus at first, then suddenly it began to drop sheer in the section known as the Devil’s Corkscrew. The heat became sizzling as you descended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the stupendous height and sheer sides of the brilliantly colored gorges and masses of shadows above. Then the Devil’s Corkscrew fell into a sandy dell where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst would fill this gorge in about a jiffy; but a cloudburst is the last thing on earth you need expect in this land of scant showers and no water. Suddenly, you turn a rock angle, and the yellow, muddy, turbulent flood of the Colorado swirls past you, tempestuous, noisy, sullen and dark, filling the narrow canyon with the war of rock against water. What seemed to be mere foothills far above, now appear colossal peaks sheer up and down, penning the angry river between black walls. It was no longer hot. We could hear a thunder shower reverberating back in some of the valleys of the Canyon; and the rain falling between us and the red rocks was as a curtain to the scene shifting of those old earth and mountain and water gods hiding in the wings of the vast amphitheater.

And if you want a wilder, more eery trail than down Bright Angel, go from Dripping Springs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great many wild mountain trails in the Rockies, North and South; but I have never known one that will give more thrills from its sheer beauty and sheer daring. You go out round the ledges of precipice after precipice, where nothing holds you back from a fall 7,000 feet straight as a stone could drop, nothing but the sure-footedness of your horse; out and out, round and round peak after peak, till you are on the tip top and outer edge of one of the highest mountains in the Canyon. This is the trail of old Louis Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the center of the Canyon and built his own trail to one of its grandest haunts. Louis used to live under the arch formed by the Dripping Springs; but Louis has long since left, and the trail is falling away and is now one for a horse that can walk on air and a head that doesn’t feel the sensations of champagne when looking down a straight 7,000 feet into darkness. If you like that kind of a trail, take the trip; for it is the best and wildest view of the Canyon; but take two days to it, and sleep at Louis’ deserted camp under the Dripping Springs. Yet if you don’t like a trail where you wonder if you remembered to make your will and what would happen if the gravel slipped from your horse’s feet one of these places where the next turn seems to jump off into atmosphere, then wait; for the day must surely come when all of the Grand Canyon’s 217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American public as Egypt.