A fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon burned down the Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitor station, the Ranger station, their housing, and part of the forest. Years ago, before we had children, my wife and I vacationed there. We watched out the dining room windows at a thunderstorm. The next day climbers, who’d crossed from the South Rim, asked if it was raining up here! Yes, the rim is a mile high and the rain never made it down. We took a dirt road to Point Sublime, the most secluded spot we could get to, and just enjoyed each other’s company against the gorgeous scenery, the rocks changing color as the sun moved. Our only company were climbers who came over the edge around lunch time and chatted with us about the gorgeous scenery.
We took a drive to see Bryce and Zion National Parks but couldn’t wait to get back to the Grand Canyon, truly my favorite place on earth.
Now everything on the North Rim is gone, consumed by the forest fires that have been destroying the West while rain and floods damage the East.
We’ve also been to the South Rim, easier to get to and busier because of it. In mid-winter, snow blew up from the rim into our faces. We could see the North Rim a mile away, the Lodge distinctly visible. Our children, then pretty much grown, took donkeys to the inner rim overlooking the Colorado River. My wife watched them from the ridge and later walked over to meet me. I’d worked out a route with the Rangers where I could hike reasonably. My family worried that I couldn’t carry enough water and insisted I turn around after lunch, which I ate on a ledge. I had no way to measure distance but I had gone maybe a thousand vertical feet down. I turned around as promised but going up was much easier and faster than going down so I could have climbed much further down. One of my life’s big regrets is that I never got to do that and that we never floated down to Phantom Ranch on the river at the base of the Canyon.
There is a peace and quiet at the Canyon that I love and crave, like there is at many national parks. I remember touring Yellowstone and wishing the guide would just shut up. But the North Rim was special. We listened to the sound of the wind rushing over the wings of the swifts as they dived, reaching nearly one hundred miles per hour!
It hurts just thinking about the fire damage. And all because we didn’t believe the scientists, the same kind of careful, painstaking people who created the world we live in, who made us safer and healthier than my parents could have imagined, put tools and entertainment systems in our hands that Americans would have envied as recently as a generation or two ago. But we haven’t heeded the scientists who’ve been warning us the climate would change, flood us, burn our homes and forests and change our world. We couldn’t be bothered to protect the world we live in. Shame on us and those who call themselves our leaders.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb
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