One morning 100 miles in, we pulled the boats over at Shinumo Creek, which seemed like a nondescript side stream. After a few minutes hiking up the creek, we found a clear green waterfall, an oasis entirely unlike the desert river we’d been on. There were monkey flowers and maidenhair ferns growing in the seeps along the grotto walls, and when I dove under the falls, I felt something nibbling my toes. One of the guides told me it was likely some of those tiny fish.
The Canyon holds so much history: Native American origin stories and tales of Spanish conquistadors who said the canyon was unnavigable in 1540. We saw boreholes high up on the canyon walls where the Bureau of Reclamation thought about damming the Colorado in the 1960s before the project was rejected when environmental groups protested. We heard about early river runners at camp.
I could feel the layers of time, and that was without even considering the physical history of the canyon, where the basement rocks deep in the gorge are 1.8 billion years old.
The Final Rapids
The Grand Canyon is both deeply untamed and heavily controlled.