THE DEPTH OF LIFE
Eventually, I got married and moved across the country with my husband and our four children, while Johnny stayed in Tucson with his wife and their three kids. Now, in middle age, we’d found another opportunity to travel together: we were two native Arizonans who had never been to the Grand Canyon. But I’d seen plenty of pictures, and thought I knew what to expect. What I was looking forward to most was the physical challenge. I would be hiking 38 kilometres in three days with a 1,340-metre elevation drop the first day, a 1,828-metre gain the last, and 11 kilograms on my back.
I also hoped to encounter the work of Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, one of very few female architects working in the early 20th century. Colter was a pioneering, chain-smoking feminist in a male-dominated field, way ahead of her time in using Native techniques to construct many of the Grand Canyon’s most famous buildings, including Hopi House, Lookout Studio, Bright Angel Lodge, the 21-metre-tall Desert Watchtower, and the rustic Phantom Ranch, where Johnny and I would camp on our first night.
As it turn ed out, I got to see only a few of Colter’s buildings —we didn’t have the time, and access was restricted because of COVID-19. It was just as well, because when we arrived on the South Rim and I glimpsed the chasm behind Bright Angel Lodge , I had to sit to keep my knees from buckling. The setting sun illuminated the gradations of colour on the west-facing wall—a majestic, not-of-this-world immensity, almost frightening in