There's Something Liberating About Being Lost

We got lost looking for the Grand Canyon.

The GPS in my sisters' car almost always got her where she needed to go. Emphasis on 'almost'. The one time it didn’t was when we left our hotel room on Saturday, got into her minivan and turned it on; our location? The Grand Canyon Visitors Center. And then we were off. We drove along a highway but soon got off it into a road lined with the scrubby desert trees, snow and ice still clinging to the earth on presidents day weekend in February.

We drove for… well, for hours. It brought us directly away from the canyon. We didn’t know that. Every time we saw a rise in the road, we’d claim that a sign would be just over it. It never was. We got really irritated, wondering how hard it could be to find the flipping grand canyon. It’s huge, how huge we didn’t yet know. Because we couldn't find the freaking thing. We joked around like, maybe the grand canyon doesn’t really exist. No one told us because they thought we already knew.

Well, eventually, after a long long long long time, we found it. Made our way through the line of cars that were there - around noon- and found a parking space. We weren’t going down, that day. We might have if the GPS didn’t screw up so badly. Instead, we went to the visitors center and looked at all their exhibits, then watched a video about art in the grand canyon.

In the video, it said that when Lewis and Clarke first found the grand canyon they claimed no one would ever use it for anything. There were no natural resources to be seen, just a desert wasteland. Yet that day alone there were hundreds of people there. After we did that, we went to see the canyon.

Nothing on earth could have prepared me for what I saw. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life. Standing on the south rim, within the guardrails, we could see the clouds level with us above the canyon and on the other side. It looked like they were sliding across a sheet of glass, with flat bottoms and big puffy tops. When we looked down into the canyon at the trails, tiny infinitesimal dots could be seen. Those were humans. Humans! Just like us! They looked so incredibly tiny, it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen.

The pictures and videos I took that day don’t give the grand canyon justice, and I don’t think anything could but going there yourself. And I thought that even before we went down.

We planned to go all the way to the bottom and up, we didn’t think it would take too long. We started off, water and trail mix and uncrustables in our bags, and walked down the trail.

I remember being cocky, much more athletic than my sister, and much more energetic. She asked if I needed a drink, and I jokingly replied that ‘water is for the weak’. Several hikers returning from an overnight backpacking trip looked at me like I was crazy. We assured them I was kidding, and I did, in fact, take out my water and drink some before we continued.

It took longer than we thought just to reach the three-mile mark. I’d hiked three miles before, in less than an hour. The thing was, we were three miles straight down. The amounts of switchbacks and such needed to descend that far in the grand canyon made it take much longer.

We started around eight AM and reached the three-mile checkpoint around lunchtime, eleven or noon I can’t quite remember. Almost four hours.

We ate lunch on this amazing precipice, as did a lot of other hikers. It jutted out from the side of the canyon, but it wasn’t dangerous at all. It looked small from the top but actually fit ten or twenty people comfortably on the rocky top to sit and eat lunch. I sat the closest to the edge, being somewhat of an adrenaline junky.

From that spot, we could see deep into the canyon to the river bottom, miles away, and all the way along the rocky sides and the different ridges. It was truly breathtaking. I can’t even describe what it looked like, not in my drawings or my writing or even in photographic pictures on my phone. This is something special.

The grand canyon was put on earth by whatever higher powers there are to inspire humans, that’s a fact. The different colors and the rock formations and even the hundreds of species and the different biomes in the canyon are astounding.

I agreed to go with my sister impulsively, for bragging rights that she brought me to the grand canyon and no one else. I should do things impulsively more often, I think. We plan to go back one day, and I know I will even if my older sister doesn’t. The grand canyon is the most incredible place on earth. Better than my bed, which is saying something.

When you stand on the edge of a precipice, or even behind the safe guardrails at the top of the canyon, you can feel a kind of energy there. Pulsing up from thousands of years of history stacked on top of one another. Thousands of years that humans didn’t even exist, fossils and eruptions and earthquakes and floods. The grand canyon is timeless. In years and years and years nothing in the natural world could change it so dramatically that it’s unrecognizable, yet the grand canyon is never the same. No picture, however similar, is exactly the same.

We got lost looking for the grand canyon, but I wish we’d gotten lost inside. I could live there for a hundred years and still have more to explore, it’s incredible. Standing on the edge of the grand canyon made me think anything was possible.

I was able to go to the grand canyon with my sister because I’d dropped out of high school for a term, dealing with very bad clinical depression. The grand canyon was the start of my long and difficult recovery, something I’m still dealing with. One day I want to stand on the edge of the grand canyon without a doubt in my mind that I’ll be okay. I want to stand there and not thinking about hurling myself off the precipice. I want to stand there, a high school diploma in my hand, and know that anything is possible.

Because anything is possible.