The Ant Effect

If you have ever had the pleasure (or the pain if you happen to be tall) of sitting in the window seat of an airplane you have experienced the “ant effect”; the phenomenon of people and cars appearing to be ants scurrying around on model roads and in and out of toy buildings.  Everything appears to be so small and insignificant.  But from the ground it is the jumbo jet that is a mere dot zipping across the sky dwarfed by an infinite void limited only by our finite frame of reference.  The pure scale of the earth is incredible.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to travel to the Grand canyon for the first time.  Despite warnings from the park service and concern from my family I decided to hike from the south rim to the river and back in a day via the south Kaibab trail.  I started at the trailhead at 7 am carrying 6 liters of water, some energy bars, a headlamp, and a jacket.  I hike-jogged down to the river, a distance of 7 miles, in about an hour stopping to snap photos along the way of the dramatic canyon walls and convoluted landscape carved by water over millions of years.  I continued on a few more miles to the bright angel campground to refill my water and started back up meeting my dad about a mile outside the inner gorge.  Together we hiked again down into the inner gorge so he could satisfy his needs as a geologist to see the great unconformities, which to the untrained eye are pretty cool looking but to the geologist tells a fascinating history of the rock.  We stopped and ate lunch about halfway down the inner gorge.

When you look at the grand canyon from the rim it is spectacular, dramatic, incredible, (insert cliché adjective that cannot come close to describing the panorama), but its only once you get down into the canyon that you really get a sense of the scale.  The canyon is 10 miles across as the crow flies, 25 miles by trail, and about a mile deep.  From the rim the inner gorge looks small and rather undramatic, dwarfed by the massive canyon.  But once you get into the inner gorge you realize it is nearly 1000 feet deep (bigger than the new river gorge) bisected by the roaring Colorado River; tame rapids from the rim become standing waves from inside the canyon.  It’s hard to comprehend the pure massiveness of the canyon when even 1000 foot deep gorges and major rivers succumb to the ant effect from the rim.

The Grand Canyon from the south rim: look for the inner gorge.

The South Kaibab Trail: Everything you can see in the picture is the inner Gorge.

The great nonconformities.

Me in the yellow shirt in the upper right hand corner.

 We hiked out of the canyon well before afternoon set in trekking for about 20 miles total.  The dramatic change in perspective and mind blowing scenery just in a morning’s hike inspired the travel urge inside me.  South America here I come.