Wayne's Blog: GRAND CANYON DRAMA

The only other Grand Canyon tourist I saw catching ice pellets on their tongue today was a ten-year-old girl. Not that many people ventured far from their cars.

Snow squalls swept through the Grand Canyon, powered by wind gusts that topped 40 mph. Swirling storm clouds suspended over the emptiness were dark and ominous in shadow, then brilliant white in broken sunlight. Two distant ravens soared upwards and vanished. A peregrine falcon, wings locked and angled like a fighter jet, flashed below in the tailwind, its steel-gray silhouette rarely viewed from above.

It was a wind insistent on pushing you into the abyss. Yet, when one of the squalls blasts out of the Canyon into your face, it slams you backwards, making you tighten your grip on the juniper branch. Despite the harsh weather, or perhaps because of it, every minute the view changes. How do you tear yourself away from the surging drama?

On the Canyon rim's Trail of Time, you walk backwards in Earth history, each step equivalent to one million years, marked in the pavement with brass dots. At appropriate ages, samples of the Grand Canyon's rock layers are displayed.

Finally, after 270 steps, you come to the sample of the rocks all around you -- Kaibab Limestone. You can rub your fingers over shelly creatures that lived and died in a warm sea 270 million years ago. In not too many more steps, you've passed through all the ages of the Canyon's most visible layers. You're back more than a half-billion years, back to when life in the oceans had barely gotten started, and you try to picture the world when that sand was laid down along a coast of a land devoid of plants or animals.

The wind turned me back before I got to the end of the trail -- more than 1,800 steps in total. But I'd seen enough, running my gloves over ripple marks frozen in mud a billion years ago. Touching fossilized mats of algae that once was the Earth's primary life form.

The mysteries of Grand Canyon geology are endless. Nevertheless, scientists have unraveled in amazing detail this complex story. Understanding that story starts with knowing the names of the rock layers. Then, their ages. Then, what their world looked like. Then, what was going around the globe that caused such big changes -- mountains, oceans, deserts, coastal plains, all come and go over hundreds of millions of years. I'm trying.

A famous naturalist, Louis Agassiz, said (if I remember his quote correctly), "Go to Nature. Look. See for yourself."