AA-2026-774C08
On the image
Down at river level, the Grand Canyon stops being a postcard and starts being geology in your face. The Colorado runs low and greenish between walls of Vishnu Schist — rock that is, by any reasonable measure, older than the concept of being old — while a pale, layered butte frames itself neatly in the gap above, performing the scenic grandeur that five million visitors a year drive to the South Rim specifically to photograph from a safe distance and then drive home.
What the rim-top crowd never sees is this: the canyon floor in 2002 was accessible to anyone willing to hike the Bright Angel or South Kaibab trail, and a meaningful number of them were surprised to discover that 'going to the bottom' involves about four thousand feet of descent and the same four thousand feet back up, ideally not in July. The National Park Service had been posting signs about this since roughly the Eisenhower administration, with limited success.
The scrubby riparian growth along the bank — tamarisk, mostly, an invasive species the Park Service was actively trying to eradicate by this point — is perhaps the one detail in this scene that would not have been here two hundred years ago. Everything else has been waiting, unchanged, for half a billion years.
Visually related — by likeness
Colorado River at the Inner Gorge, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2002. 2002. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-774C08. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/colorado-river-at-the-inner-gorge-grand-canyon-arizona-2002.
@misc{aaAA2026774C08,
title = {Colorado River at the Inner Gorge, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2002},
year = {2002},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-774C08},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/colorado-river-at-the-inner-gorge-grand-canyon-arizona-2002}
}TY - ART TI - Colorado River at the Inner Gorge, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2002 PY - 2002 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-774C08 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/colorado-river-at-the-inner-gorge-grand-canyon-arizona-2002 ER -
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