I sit in my tiny, dirty hotel room in Flagstaff, Arizona, and try to produce the words to summarize my feelings towards the last three weeks of my life. I’m stuck, with a classic case of writer’s block. Writing about this collision of deep emotions, dramatic landscapes, and endangered organisms is no easy task.
I look to my journal that I attended to each night on our journey down the mighty Colorado and to Edward Abbey’s Down the River, which also accompanied me, for inspiration. I think back to a night spent about halfway through my 20-something day adventure, where I sat on an outcrop of metamorphosed black rock and watched the stars begin to poke out from the darkening night sky. That night, I wrote in my journal:
It’s twilight and we’re deep in the Granite Gorge. So deep— a glimmer of the Redwall Limestone can barely be seen from only one angle of camp. So deep— the Tapeats Sandstone is hundreds of feet above us, the same ancient layer which we had made our home next to during the last week. So deep— the heat radiates off the canyon walls, even after the Sun has long ceased to cook its surface. A sliver of moon pokes out between clouds, the stars are as bright as ever. I sit on a slab of Vishnu Schist, my favorite layer in the Canyon, which overlooks the river and no doubt has undergone millions, if not billions, of years of intense heat and pressure, only to be revealed and sculpted by the Mighty Colorado River. What a courageous formation. I’m mesmerized under the light encased within the canyon walls. Endorphins, pure happiness, and wonder course through my veins. I’m back, and I am more grateful than ever before to be here. The outside world no longer matters, I belong here, in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. This place is a drug. Addicting, exciting— it lures you in and is a bitch to leave behind. The roar of the whitewater’s deepest holes, the boatmen’s endless chatter, the fascinating history… I can’t get enough. I’m so incredibly lucky.
There were several nights on my third trip through the Grand Canyon where these intense waves of happiness hit me. It is moments like these, that endlessly inspire me, bring tears to my eyes, and remind me to be grateful for my experiences.
Back in February, I reached out to Mike Yard, a fisheries biologist at Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, which is a subunit of USGS, about accompanying him as a volunteer on a three-week river trip. Yard does several of these trips each year to study the humpback chub populations, an endangered native fish to the Colorado River. It seems like it was just yesterday when we agreed that I would be a part of his July trip during a phone call. Once we hung up, I nearly cried of excitement as I sat in a King Soopers parking lot and realized that I found a way back to the Canyon. Now those three weeks have passed, and I’m struggling to wrap my head around the mirage of events that occurred on our 21-day, 20-person, 10,000-plus-fish-captured adventure.
The three weeks were a time warp. As a whole, they flew by. I can’t believe they’re already over. But during the trip on a daily basis, time moved ever-so-slowly. Completely cut off from the outside world (except for the boatmen’s occasional late-night sat-phone conversation), the days dragged on. It seemed like decades went by. In a good way though, especially once shade hit our camp in the late afternoon and we became temporarily relieved from the flaming orb of death. I feel like I’ve missed so much from the outside world. I know that I really missed nothing.
Aside from all my new knowledge of the humpback chub and other fish in the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, as well as a few tips and tricks from the boatmen, I’ve learned (more like been reminded of), one key thing. The Grand Canyon is where I’m meant to be. There’s a reason it keeps calling back to me, there’s a reason I can’t stop thinking about it, there’s a reason I daydream about it during lectures and exams. One of the boatmen said about two weeks into our trip, “you have a deep, dark future down here,” meaning I’ve clearly caught the river bug and I’m doomed to an eternity in the Big Ditch. This doesn’t seem so terrible. As long as a “deep, dark future” means nights under the stars, hard work in 115-degree heat, epic sunsets, cool mornings, and dozens of runs through Lava Falls.
I’m not as sad to leave the Canyon as I have been in the past. One way or another, I know I’ll find my way back. I’m simply possessed by the drug that is the Grand Canyon. I realized this under the stars in the Granite Gorge as I wrote in my journal, “This place is a drug. Addicting, exciting…” and Edward Abbey so perfectly explains this in his essay, “In the Canyon” from Down the River. He writes:
The Canyon belongs to itself, to the world, to God, for whatever those grand abstractions are worth. And so far as the term “possession” has meaning, it would be more accurate to say that the Canyon possesses us. Those who love it are possessed by it. We belong to the Canyon, having known it a little and loved it too much, as indeed all those who love the land, who love the earth, belong to it and consign themselves to it and finally return to it.