The Grand Canyon Comes to Life

The Grand Canyon was beautiful, breathtaking, benevolent, sacred and a collection of about a million other adjectives that I could use to describe its beauty. It’s as if God took a brush and painted one of the most beautiful and intense canvases that can neither be captured in any camera or any post card. You can’t help but put your faith back in the Supreme Being who created something so precious and beautiful. Untouched and untarnished by the vulgar habit of humans to commercialize every inch of mother earth.

As I ran/walked the morning of our second day with Caroline Casey, and took a walk with Tiffany O’Neal over a path on the afternoon of our third day there, that’s all I could think about. Time has come to stand still in the aging rocks of the Grand Canyon. I wonder what atrocities the underbrush has witnessed. I wonder how much history has been archived in the walls of the Canyon. What stories the Hopi Indian tribes may have shared there or the pain and joy that John Wesley Powell, the one-armed explorer who braved the rivers and valleys of the great canyon and made the basis for much of the documentation that is followed even now.

Despite the fact that there was such immense beauty all around us, it did seem a bit surprising that there was such limited connectivity for cell phone reception or internet out there. The hotel that we were staying at, provided the equivalent of a slowspeed, dial up connection that worked only when it was fed two dollar bills for a duration of 8 minutes. Sharlene, Roberto and Bulent were all those who suffered from money-gone-no-service syndrome when the browser refused to spit out ay data after receiving what it referred to as the “generous contribution” from each of them.

Here’s a piece of advise of people who consider the internet to be part of their lifelines into the real world – take a satellite phone with you or invest in some kind of communication peripherals that will allow you to have two-way communication. Even those little walkie-talkies would do.