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By Root 867 0

’d thought it was about five), eighteen miles across at its widest point, more than a mile deep, and all created by the Colorado River taking four million years to cut its way through layers of rock, exposing two billion years of the earth’s geological history. Unless, of course, you’re a religious nut, in which case all of that erosion never happened and the fossils were placed in the ground by God, and none of the geological history counted for anything – it all just magically appeared one day about six thousand years ago.

We finally arrived at a little siding and I set off to walk up to the canyon. One of the many great things about the Grand Canyon is that it has a similar element of surprise to the one I’d experienced at Meteor Crater: you can’t see it until the last few seconds before arriving at its rim. My guide – a lovely woman wearing a kind of boy scout’s cap and the olive-green uniform of a National Park ranger – walked with me up about forty stairs, then steered me towards a little promontory. She promised I’d get a good view when I reached the top. I walked along a path and then got my first glimpse. I almost stopped dead in my tracks; I certainly slowed my pace. Oh my God, I thought. It was magnificent. Stunning. But then I realised I was only looking at the hills in the distance. I’d been bowled over by the beauty and grandeur of them, and I hadn’t even seen the main attraction yet. I walked further forward and caught my first glimpse of the actual canyon. Of course, I’d known there was drama lurking just around the corner, but I hadn’t appreciated the sheer scale of that drama until the moment when I stood at its edge. I felt the same as the first time I saw the Himalayas. But, if anything, the Grand Canyon is even better.

It’s like a thousand temples of rock painted in a vast palette of colours. Sandy, pale yellows merge with cool or warm pinks and dozens of shades of red and orange. There are greens and blues, pale greys, like ash, darker blue–greys and black. It’s truly awesome and almost impossible to describe – its grandeur and magnificence are just too grand and too magnificent. All I could think to say on camera was that it was so much more than I had imagined and quite unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life.

Standing back a wee bit because there was a sense of being blown by a wind whooshing up and out of the canyon, I suddenly got the frights. In the short time that I had been staring open-mouthed at it, the canyon had already changed. Even relatively small movements of the sun had quite profound effects, simply because it’s so vast. There are canyons within canyons within canyons. And there are probably canyons within those canyons, but I couldn’t see that far into its depths. Like an inverted mountain range, vastly more was hidden than could be seen.

With a kind of creepy silence to it, the canyon has a lovely eeriness that overwhelms and hushes the voices of all the tourists. I’m reluctant to say it has some of that old hippy ‘a certain kind of energy’ stuff, but it does. Like the Arctic, it has a presence, a dominance, a weird kind of silencing effect that’s impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t stood at its edge. It has to be seen and heard to be believed, so when you stand on the edge, it’s a matter of just shutting up and sucking in the experience. As I’m sure you can tell, I loved it.

As I said earlier, I’ve recently started telling people not to visit the places I film for television shows. I’ve become concerned that these often remote, empty places will be spoiled if people rush to see them. ‘Go and see a good film of it,’ I say, ‘and leave the bloody thing alone.’ But I’m prepared to make an exception in the case of the Grand Canyon. I would urge everyone to go and see it. But, as President Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.’ God bless his wee bum. What a wise guy.

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Back in Williams, having returned from the canyon, I was getting ready to move on to the next destination when I heard