Like Another Life

I was laying in bed last night thinking about how this place feels like home to me now. I had thought it was going to be so hard to leave behind my college existence and become an "adult." It had taken me hours to officially leave my college apartment, thinking I would never again feel a place as homey to me as this.

But the Grand Canyon is home now. How strange is that to say? I know all the roads, the good places to hike to avoid tourists, how to get in and out without waiting in line at the gates. When I drive here, it's second-nature now. No more maps, no more anxiety about finding where I'm going.

Of course, at my other home(s), you rarely hear about French tourists falling off the edge of your backyard and needing rangers to repel down to get you. Which was exactly what happened to an 18-year-old French boy who was taking pictures too close to the ledge. He's in the hospital with neck, wrist and other injuries. Was that picture really worth it?

It happens all the time here. People go "oh hey, lets go right up to the edge of this massively giant hole in the ground... whoops!" It's for this reason I never leave the trail... for anything. Ever. I think because the distance down (a vertical mile) is so great, people can't wrap their brains around what it means to stand on the edge... or fall. There are some places you can fall anywhere from 200 feet to oh, 2,000 feet. That's about two Eiffel towers stacked on top of each other.

Would you like to fall the distance of the Empire State Building? All 1,472 feet of it? No? Try telling that to the tourists who stand on the edge of The Abyss and pose for awkward pictures. I'd rather have still good, acceptable pictures behind a railing and you know, live, than tempt fate by crawling out on the ledge.

And I don't think people understand what the rangers here go through trying to save people who do stupid things. They have to put their own lives on the line and dangle above that huge drop to come and get you. Or be fixed on a rope tied to a helicopter. Or run up a trail in the heat of summer to carry you out.

Some people who collapse are in very, very poor physical condition and end up having to be carried somewhere--even up and out. Imagine trying to help carry a 200-lb woman in a basket up a narrow and extremely steep, crowded trail with 100 degree heat baring down on you. Cause that is what these people do.