It was Monday, my husband’s conference was over, and we had reserved the day for the Grand Canyon. A place I could have happily explored this wonder for a month, but we were only there for a few hours. And, even though our visit was brief, I am still trying to integrate such a profound experience.

But let’s start at the break of day, or rather before the sun crested the red hills to bring light to the morning. It’s 3 am, and my husband has decided to seize a chance to see the stars with minimal light pollution. As you may recall, we are sharing a pullout sofa in the living room/dining room/kitchen of our hotel room. He gets up quietly, leaves, and returns about 15 minutes later, but I have woken with the artificial light that streams in through the hallway. Soon I am wide awake. There’s no way I’m falling back into slumber, and I’m now way beyond sleep deprived if you take into account the combined total number of hours I’ve managed to accumulate over the past four nights. I’m telling you this because that numinous state of not being wholly present in one’s body likely helped create the dream-like quality of the day and my experience of witnessing the Grand Canyon for the first time.

I thought about napping in the car during the two-hour drive to the the South Rim of the Grand Canyon from Sedona, but we were due for a family talk, and I didn’t want to miss seeing any part of a landscape I had never experienced before. We took the fasted route, which I have been told is less scenic than the one that winds through the mountains. There was a whole lot of uniformity during that drive, in rows of perfectly planted pine trees, making me wonder what the area looked like before the touch of man.

As it was still early in the season, there was just a short queue to get our day’s pass at the entrance to the park. Inside the park, the vegetation is allowed to be mostly wild, and about two minutes before we reached the parking lot, after seeing a couple of herds of antelopes (new to us), my daughter announced she thought she saw a moose. In all the years we’ve lived in New England (my children and husband were born here, and I moved to New Hampshire when I was 4.5 yrs. old) not one of us had seen a moose in the wild.

We debated walking back in the direction of the where my daughter saw the mystery creature after we parked the car, but our eagerness to see the canyon won over the unlikely chance that it would still be there. A quick check on Google revealed that moose are not native to Arizona, but on a rare occasion have been known to venture over from Colorado. Could one of those rare moments be now, we wondered as we overheard another visitor, a boy of about the age of 11, talking with his family about the moose they had just seen…

When one approaches the South Rim of the Grand Canyon from the parking lot, you are among a sea of visitors milling about, going to the bathroom, looking at maps, and trying to orient themselves for their visit. The area is filled with concrete paths that weave through parking lots, informational structures, and a fair bit of wildlife in the form of rather tame squirrels begging for food.

For first time visitors, especially those deprived of sleep, the experience can be slightly over-whelming as you make your way to one of the main viewing points. I highly recommend finding a location with a railing for your first glimpse of the canyon so as to safely take in its breadth and depth. There are many points along the rim that do not have railings. And, nothing can prepare you for the experience that opens before you when you step beyond the trees and bushes and the canyon drops down and out without a visible ending. It is impossible to fathom the utter magnificence of creation contained in such a vast canvas of exquisite beauty that has existed, untarnished for five million years.

When I stepped to the rim, and tried to take in the vision of the Grand Canyon, I was wholly and completely overcome. The rules of logic and physics play with the senses as they try to comprehend such an extreme of space and depth layered in a canvas of exquisite beauty that is, quite literally, the belly of Earth. One feels as though you are peering into the body of the Goddess. Gaia opens before you in all her raw splendor and power, and you suddenly feel both insignificant and vulnerable; filled with humility and awe. One step beyond the edge and death is certain. You stand upon the precipice of Life itself and realize you are the only one holding onto it. It is an experience unlike anything else. Photos and stories cannot prepare you for that moment, nor should they. You are there to be transformed, and you will be, if you open fully to the wonder before you.

We walked along a fair amount of the South Rim pathway as the clouds began to roll in, just avoiding the rain shower that followed us back to the parking lot. The skies were glorious before they turned gray, and we stopped often to take photographs of this unforgettable experience:

And, in case you were still wondering about the moose…we spotted it in the woods on our way out of the Grand Canyon. And, although we can’t be 100 percent sure it was a moose, we’re sticking to our story 😉