A blog about photography & transformative art
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Things get very basic when dehydration sets in. The higher aspirations of life evaporate into wisps of nothingness. When dehydration grips you there is nothing left but the desire for water and for shade. It's a curious thing about water—it's something very ordinary until you really need it. Then it is everything.
There I stood, face-to-face with the Scary Spot. I rehearsed this moment in my mind for weeks. Would I turn around and go home? Would I crawl across it? Would I sit down on my ass and slide past it? Like so many of life's mental rehearsals, I did the unexpected. I just walked across it. My heart was pounding, my legs were a little shaky. I dug my hiking poles in a little deeper. I did *not* look over the edge. All in all, given the context of the overall experience, the Scary Spot wasn't all that scary. I think, by now, my brain was numb to it.
It doesn't take long before Nankoweap plays tricks with your head. The genuine Nankoweap, the real deal, starts when you see the sign welcoming you to Grand Canyon National Park. That takes awhile to reach. Before that the path is a national forest trail, officially called Saddle Mountain Trail 57. This preliminary trail is a rigorous romp in an alpine forest studded with aspen. It offers a compelling vista of much of Northern Arizona from over 8000 feet in elevation. Saddle Mountain Trail 57 is lovely and dramatic but everything before Nankoweap is foreplay.
There are two ways to find your way to Nankoweap. Both require a long hike into the Saddle Mountain Wilderness of Kaibab National Forest. One can get to Nankoweap from the north or from the west. We came in from the west, a choice that has its advantages at the start of the long hike but extracts a pound or two of flesh at the end. At the start of this crisp morning, we didn't realize how annoying the end would be. Saddle Mountain just seemed in the way. I barely noticed any of it.
The balmy air at the North Rim was speaking to me. I should have been listening. Late September in these rarefied parts is normally brisk, sometimes even cold. On this day of our arrival we were comfortable in short sleeves. If it were warm here, the inner furnace of the canyon would be even hotter than normal. But the Nankoweap Trail was already playing with my head. I'd heard and read so much about its steepness, ruggedness, and dizzying heights I didn't even bother to think of its exposure to heat and sun. But in the end it's the heat that always matters in Grand Canyon. Always.
I'm getting sick of picture-perfect pictures. Slickness is not a virtue. When I was an undergrad and studying photography, I had perfection and rigid rules rammed down my throat. It was like being a goose whose liver was being fattened for foie gras. There we all sat, young and impressionable artists, while they stuffed this and that down our gullets. It pretty much ruined me for photography for about twenty years. I'm just now recovering.
A sneaky, little heat wave is sinking its tendrils into our neighborhood. These nasty things barely announce themselves. The change starts off with an imperceptible shift in the breeze. The branches of our weeping birches go this way instead of that. Or they swirl around indecisively until they decide that the ocean air is no longer welcome. Like a songbird being stalked by a raptor, suddenly I look around, head darting from side to side. "Shit!" I hate heat waves. Give me a drippy, rainy, foggy, gloomy day anytime. I look at anyone who says they love the heat with bemusement. I just don't understand it.
I love photography but walking around with a camera is hardly a comfortable thing. It's starting to cause a tingling feeling in my upper shoulder. The damned shoulder strap, made of some puny, little, sponge pad digs into the nook that forms the junction between neck and shoulder. I think its starting to create a permanent ridge.
Short and nasty. A heatwave hit us here in Northern California last week. The summer had been the coldest I can remember. It was fog for weeks, maybe months. After awhile the days blur together into a diffuse mass of whiteness. Then, in a moment, everything got hot. Very hot. A few days later, just as quickly as it came, it was over. The fog whipped in and the whiteness once again prevailed.
The world is at its best when it is nestling itself into the night's sleep. Second to that are the first stirrings of morning, before the crush of humanity has a chance to break the spell. A summer morning in San Francisco is particularly satisfying. Come July a thick, fog blanket shrouds the city in its daybreak which makes San Francisco the most silent of summer cities. This is especially true when one is away from the main arteries that feed the caffeine-starved commuters into downtown. A walk along the side streets and into the parks we find the morning vignettes that define the foggy, San Francisco dawn.
