Eight Canyons in Eight Days

At the mere mention of the word "canyon", one's mind almost instantly conjures up images of the American West, heroes and villains of yesteryear who fought for their long-forgotten causes against the backdrop of crimson stone and azure skies, early explorers oft remembered for their great successes while their checkered pasts became relegated to obscurity, entrepreneurs who looked upon the most awesome beauty nature has to offer and saw only dollar signs, and civilizations which lay in near ruins after it was all said and done.  The taming of the American West, when considered in the harsh light of historical hindsight, is a bittersweet pill to swallow.  But the more we learned about this dark territory, in large part through our grandiose mistakes in land management throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the more the preservation of the American West became a part of our national identity.  The forming of the national park system helped usher in an era of ecotourism, an era whose mantra has always been balancing the need to protect our precious national treasures with the need to provide access to them, for people cannot truly value a treasure which they can never see.

While canyons exist all over the American West, nowhere are they more numerous and spectacular than in the arid regions of southern Utah and northern Arizona.  Carved out of a vast layer cake of ancient seabeds known as the "Grand Staircase", the canyons of this region have formed through the violent action of innumerable flash floods and harsh windstorms over millions of years, and they have been preserved by the intervening and prevalent desert solitude.  Clarence Dutton, who originally conceptualized the Grand Staircase as a series of five steps emerging from the bottom of the Grand Canyon and leading all the way up to Bryce Canyon, named the five steps after their predominant color:  The Chocolate Cliffs, The Vermilion Cliffs, The White Cliffs, The Grey Cliffs, and The Pink Cliffs.  Geologists have since subdivided each step into many different rock strata, strata which form an almost continuous history of the earth's development all the way from 2 billion years in the past (the bottom of the Grand Canyon) up to 100 million years in the past (Bryce Canyon.)  In this respect and in many others, the Grand Staircase is like no other place in the world.

I had been to all of the national parks in Utah and Arizona at least once before, but I had never explored any of them in detail.  In particular, the prospect of hiking down into the Grand Canyon was very alluring, and I had always wanted to see the Virgin River Narrows in Zion.  And the last (and only time) I had ever seen Bryce, it was completely socked in.  But while a Grand Staircase adventure tour was definitely on my agenda, it wasn't on this year's agenda until I happened into the tour by accident.  I didn't have a lot of vacation saved up with my new job, so if I wanted to take a whole week off, I was going to have to do it during the week of the July 4 shutdown.  I had never taken a tour with The World Outdoors before, but they came up in a web search of touring companies running trips for that week.  The canyons tour caught my eye in particular because of the reasons mentioned above.  But I later found many more reasons to love The World Outdoors, as I discovered that while they are a small and laid back company, their degree of professionalism is unmatched among any of the ecotourism outfitters I've used.  They keep their tour sizes small and intimate (ours was smaller than normal-- the July 4 tour was hard to sell due to the heat), they maintain an individual rapport with each tour member, and they share my lust for exploration, the thirst for learning the story behind the scenery, the realization that it is through the wisdom of shared experience that we begin to truly understand and appreciate our place in nature.

Our canyon tour began in the booming retirement community of St. George, Utah, originally established as a seat of cotton production during a failed attempt by Brigham Young to make Utah completely self-sufficient.  Four adventurers from across the country, including myself, Orah from NYC, Linda from Michigan, and David from Pittsburgh, were joined by guides Chuck and Mark on our journey up and down the Grand Staircase from Bryce to Grand Canyon to Zion and scenic points of interest in between, a journey that we took by foot, by pedal power, and at times hanging from ropes in mid air.