One spring moment in the Grand Canyon

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

By Brooke Williams

I thought we were stealing something - the deep desert plants and sandstone confusing my nearly shivering body as I sat with my back against a rock in on Toltec Beach. We were three days into a week-long hike in the Grand Canyon. I was with a group of people associated with the Grand Canyon Trust of Flagstaff, Ariz., doing what conservationists don’t do enough of - actually experiencing the landscapes they’re trying to protect.

My legs felt trashed after the first day of descending nearly 1,500 vertical feet of elevation from the South Rim. The descent included an hour up and down on the Coconino layer, where we looked for the “Rabbit Hole,” a natural vertical cave inside a rock that has been used by animals, Indians, miners, and hikers to get from the rim to the river and back. Day two involved doing the equivalent of 2 million knee bends as we made our way through the house-sized boulders in Royal Arch Canyon at an immeasurably slow speed.

Today, we found a route to a ledge that took us in and out of side canyons thick with wildflowers - black brush in yellow bloom, delicate purple mariposa lilies and a dozen species of daisies. The scenic side canyons took us to a short rappel down a limestone cliff with a steep drop down very loose scree slope to the beach.

I’d sunk my feet into deep new sand, recently deposited by last month’s planned release of 300,000 gallons of water per minute for three days to rebuild beaches and nursery habitat for desert fish. “Enough water to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes,” according to U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne. This is only the third planned flood in the 40 years since the gates closed on Glen Canyon dam and form Lake Powell. The dam replaced the river’s seasonal fluctuations with variations depending on how much air conditioning residents of Las Vegas use.

What was fast becoming one of those perfect evening moments in a Colorado Plateau canyon was about to get even better. The sun had barely dropped behind the distant cliff when I saw it - the crescent moon with the “da Vinci glow.”

Just before leaving our vehicles at the beginning of the trip, I’d called Terry, who relayed a message she’d received about a “moon of perilous beauty” to occur early in the evening on April 7. I’d wondered about the use of the words ‘perilous’ and ‘beauty’ together like that. What I saw that night was the tiniest, fingernail of a crescent moon on its back, with the remainder of the moon faintly outlined against the cobalt sky.

I’ve been back for a few days, and while searching my computer for specific information about what I experienced last week in that canyon, I found NASA’s “Crescent Moon Alert.” It seems as though a man driving in Kansas saw this same sight in early March, and, overcome by either the sun in his eyes or the beauty of that moon, the man had crashed his car into the guardrail. Hence the term, “perilous.”

‘Da Vinci glow’ refers to the faint outline of the moon above the crescent.  Leonardo da Vinci described this ‘Earthshine’ more than 500 years ago as the light of the earth illuminating the moon’s dark surface. According to NASA, this phenomenon is one of the most incredible sights in the heavens. 

The moon dropped behind the cliffs and the bats came and the rocks turned from red to gray to purple. I hoped the scene might repeat itself the next night. But how could it?
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One spring moment in the Grand Canyon | Planet JH News Article: General News

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