When we made the commitment to float The Grand Canyon in a dory this fall, I could not have anticipated the change it would make in me.  It's so much more than simply floating down a river.  Yes, there are rapids, scary and exhilarating, but there is so much more.  Water, life, death captured in rock for billions of years, stars that fall and seem to go on forever above the deep canyons, artifacts, petroglyphs, and pictographs of ancient people who were born of the water and canyon walls.

 

We are so small in comparison, not just our stature but in our minds, in our lives.  Billions of years the rock has been there and it's ever changing, always morphing through what man throws to it, morphing with the water, wind, sun, rain, snow, heat and cold.

 

It's a spiritual place.  Not only because those before us consider it sacred, but because it truly is a spiritual place.  Colors you cannot recreate with an artist’s canvas, emotions buried deep pulled out by the nature we all crave, that we all need.  The solace, the quiet, the soft sound of water building to the volume of a rapid, it's something we cannot know until we go there, a place that is so sacred and natural that it takes all of you in its arms so that you can take it with you when it's time to go.

 

We cannot let this go, this canyon, and all the land we call public, we cannot let it fall to the whims of those who will never experience it's magic.  We must fight for the connection we were meant to have.