Pinnacle before Storm, Grand Canyon | Mark Lindsay
If you are regular reader of this blog, you know that my buddies and I hike Grand Canyon every year. The trip is generally exhausting and to help us forget the pain which is shooting through every fiber of our bodies we tend to resort to an endless loop of repeating banter. To the casual observer it is mindless, silly, and incomprehensible nonsense. But, to three stooges from New Jersey, who have known one another for some 45 years, it all, scarily, makes perfect sense.
One of the things we recite endlessly is one particular line from The Deer Hunter where John Cazale's character looks around the familiar location of his deer-hunting trips. He paces about the outdoor scene, bewildered and agitated. "Something's different," he says. "They changed it!"
That line seems entirely apropos in Grand Canyon. The light is constantly changing everything. You can come across the same scene a hundred times and it will always look different each encounter. They changed it.
This past year I came upon a pinnacle that I'd remembered from the previous year. I remembered it because it had glowed in a eery pre-storm light, the red earth electric with the storm's accumulating energy. This year it was flat. Boring. I was disappointed as I'd, for miles, looked forward to seeing the spot. But...they changed it.
The canyon is that way. It is in constant motion, ever shifting, ever fluid. It seems still but never is. It is in the midst of constant change. Luckily, I made a photo of that magic moment which, in this blog, I am sharing with you now.