Walking the Walk...You Do Best With A Map

 Pete McBride’s The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim is a book of 1-2 page spreads and many intimate close-ups, 236 pages celebrating Canyon views photographed during whats called a “Grand Canyon traverse”, that is, a combination of hikes/backpacks where the protagonists start at the junction with the Paria River and walk the length of the Canyon, coming out at Lake Mead. (The Canyon and its National Park differ in their, in the first instance, topographic boundary, and in the second, politically constituted line.) 

At 262 pages, measuring when open, 10-1/2” by 26”, it presents many impressive landscapes. 

The endpapers are decorated by a topographic sketch of the Canyon, an artistic impression; no text.

Growing up, far from the Grand Canyon (we did not meet until I was 25), I was fascinated by maps. Back then the maps were from National Geographic. I painted my walls ocean blue and covered them with these treasures.

And then, revelation, when I came to the American West in 1962, I found a land of maps, for maps on many scales, made for, requiring maps. And again, today, I use my walls to hang Grand Canyon maps. What’s very different now, of course, is that the maps can be photographs, able to present various realities, such as this topography:  

This piece, my current obsession, is the western Greater Grand Canyon*, the Canyon’s drainage area outlined by the red line. Within that line, politically there are Hualapai Reservation and federal lands. Didactically, we can point out the main gorge, major and minor side canyons, high-rising plateaus characteristic of the Greater Grand Canyon. So while humans draw lines, the Canyon goes on its geological way, digging, washing out, bringing in, transporting, shaping, supporting a variety of life zones… We would do well, in this age of anthropogenic alteration, to take the lesson of multiplicity within an entity, blending the efforts of many regardless of land ownership, into the global initiative to deal with our evolving, more and more unpredictable, climates and environment.

Back to photographer McBride. I am no critic of art photography; Rizzoli is a big deal in such publishing. But speaking as a lover of maps, and knowing how maps have enriched my appreciation of the Grand Canyon,  I think enjoying the fine views in this book could have benefitted from some high-quality mapwork. 

What keeps this book all together is that it is about a trip, treks, a journey though the length of the Grand Canyon from its beginning. So, if you will, its a line; a line formulated from a multitude of decisions, decisions dictated by the Canyon’s landscapes. Not a straight line, not necessarily an obvious line. A line, maybe back and forth, up and down, yet still a line of a journey, marked by stops, events, named places, campsites, sites with water, surprises: the whole mishmash of Canyon adventuring.

The map I envision to illustrate such a journey would show that line, "beautifully done", tying each and every photograph to its location in the physical landscape. (Side note: It could also have indicated whether the route was inside the Park or on non-federal lands with their different rules.)

If there had been such a map, full of information, connected to those fine views, perhaps it could have been on a fold-out of the book’s size. Imagine, going back and forth on the imagined journey between each view and its provenance, bringing the reader visually closer to the physical Canyon as an entity to move through.

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*I may need to explain that name, Greater Grand Canyon; it is new and not yet formalized. It became imperative as a label when President Biden in 2023 proclaimed Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument, another step in national recognition of the entire Grand Canyon,  marching with that of President Clinton’s establishment a quarter-century ago of Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument protecting the Canyon’s northwest (along with a bunch of land draining into Lake Mead). Here is Trout Unlimited's map showing the Greater Grand Canyon's pieces: new monument in green outline, national park in purple, other monuments in tan, tribal land (some of them) in olive. Not perfect, but a start at orienting us:

The Monument's name in English can be read as: Indigenous peoples roaming; their ancestral footprints. How apposite for McBride's book on a Canyon traverse that combines roaming with a backpack, leaving with photographic prints only.

Another map (Thanks to UNM Prof. Karl Karlstrom) orients us by marking the five geological segments of the boatable, walkable physical unity: 

And still another map, thanks to the National Park Service, shows lands of the Associated Tribes, hugging the Greater Grand Canyon (can you find it) among them: 

So take the National Park, looking at it along with those portions of the Hualapai, Havasupai, Navajo, Southern Paiute, and Hopi Nations that fall (physically, spiritually) within the topographic, drainage-defined, Grand Canyon (not forgetting to include the superlative Kaibab Plateau):-- they all cohere into an entity consisting of the Colorado’s main gorge, its world of side canyons, and the plateaus they are imbedded in. That place, -- a topographic entity nestled in a political multiplicity --, that place is the Greater Grand Canyon.