It”s a chore to take the Grand plunge

One thing we discovered about the Grand Canyon last week – it’s a big hole in the ground.

As with any big hole in the ground, a person who is unlucky, careless or drunk can fall into it. The Grand Canyon is basically a couple of hundred miles of sheer cliff with busloads of tourists cavorting at the edge. Even in the Grand Canyon Village, where most of the tourists stroll, there are hardly any railings. There’s a path, there’s a buffer zone of two or three yards, and then there’s sayonara.

My wife, Carol, and I had been at the Grand Canyon approximately five minutes when we saw how an innocent tourist might easily go from being at the Grand Canyon to in the Grand Canyon. We were walking along a rim trail when a couple of rangers carrying medical equipment raced by at a trot. They were headed for a woman up ahead who had tripped on one of the rocks lining the rim trail. She was on the ground, grimacing with pain from a dislocated shoulder and a broken arm.

Yet here is what really gave me pause: When she tripped, she had fallen off the trail toward the rim edge. She was lying there in the three-yard space between the trail and the void. If she had hit the ground and rolled … well, she would have soon found herself in a new climate zone. As it was, the medics had to be careful when working on her. They didn’t want to take a step or two backward.

They didn’t, of course. They treated her and carried her away in a gurney.

The national park literature says fewer people fall off than you might imagine – just two or three people a year, on average. Plenty of people die in the Grand Canyon, but usually for other reasons. Sightseeing planes crash, river-runners get flung onto rocks and hikers die from exposure and heat exhaustion. About 250 people a year have to be rescued from the Grand Canyon, but not because they have accidentally taken the short way down. Most of them are young, fit hikers trying to make it to the bottom and back in one day, failing to notice that the trail is long, hot, dry and, on the way back, uphill.

The fact is, it’s hard to fall off a cliff. It takes some determination, some momentum. You have to give yourself a running start, or at least a leaping start. You can’t just slither off the edge. Your survival instincts will take over, your fingernails will dig in and you will soon be hanging on by a juniper branch.

So maybe it should be no surprise that more people don’t take the big tumble. Those who do are usually looking through binoculars or a camera lens and don’t realize how close they are to the edge. Or else they are posing for a photo and they fall for the old “just one more step back” trick.

Or else they have been drinking just a little too much beer. That’s what caused some alarm as Carol and I sat in the Arizona Room of the Bright Angel Lodge having a post-hike dinner. We had a window seat, looking directly out at the rim walk, just about 12 yards away. The Arizona Room was crowded and some diners were waiting outside for their names to be called. I noticed that some of these people had beers in their hands.

Then I noticed that some of these people were taking their beers across the path, and out onto the rimrock edge. Then I noticed that some of them were walking all the way out on one particular rock that jutted out over the abyss, holding their beers with one hand and slapping each other too hard across the shoulders with the other.

Haven’t these guys ever seen a “Roadrunner” cartoon? Don’t they know what happens to rocky ledges when someone stands on the tip?

But just then, the loudspeaker blared the guy’s name. He stood up, stumbled only slightly and entered the safety of the restaurant.

So you see, it is hard to fall into a big hole in the ground. Even if some people seem to be trying.