Hiker in Grand Canyon Inner Gorge, Arizona, 2002

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Hiker in Grand Canyon Inner Gorge, Arizona, 2002 — Archive & Atlas

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Hiker in Grand Canyon Inner Gorge, Arizona, 2002 — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 2002

AA-2026-99C162

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Every year several million people visit the Grand Canyon, and most of them stand at the rim, photograph the view, and go home satisfied. The woman in the lower corner did not do that. She went in, which in early-2000s Grand Canyon hiking culture meant descending past the Tonto Platform and into the inner gorge where the walls close in, the layered Redwall and Supai formations stack up overhead like the floors of a building that forgot to put in a lobby, and the sandy wash narrows to something that looks less like a national park and more like the beginning of a problem.

The trail running back through the canyon floor is the kind of surface that rewards the right boots and punishes the wrong ones, and she is dressed for it — blue fleece, sunglasses, the expression of someone who has been out here long enough to stop performing enthusiasm for the camera. The Colorado Plateau geology behind her records about 270 million years of deposition per visible stripe, which she is standing in front of for a photograph that will take up roughly a quarter inch of a photo album.

This is what dedicated canyon hikers of the early 2000s looked like: prepared, slightly sunburned, and entirely unbothered by the scale of the thing they had walked into, because bothering about it wouldn't have gotten them this far.

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