More Than A View - Grand Canyon In Depth Episode 01

Grand Canyon is more than just a view, more than just a two-dimensional landscape. There are so many lessons and ways to explore Grand Canyon. It is a laboratory. It is a virtual classroom. The diversity here is unparalleled. There's a huge landscape that is just begging to be explored. And it really just takes a moment to stop in a side canyon or sit under the trees and really get to know all the things that this landscape has to offer. It really does start to put things in perspective, I think, for a lot of people. You suddenly feel quite small, and your problems seem quite small as you're standing here on the edge of the canyon because there's just so much to try to take in. In Grand Canyon, you'll find a whole host of environments, everything from cool fir forests to hot, dry deserts, riparian zones, and over a million acres of wild landscape that have been the stage for human exploration and inspiration for generations. Most of Grand Canyon's visitors first arrive on the South Rim. Very few of those folks actually find their way over to the North Rim, and even fewer descend into the canyon itself. Statistics tell us that only about 5% of our visitors actually will drop down below the rim. These folks arrive at the canyon, and they find their way to the first viewpoint. They look down into this two-dimensional landscape and feel that they have experienced Grand Canyon. But what they're missing out on is the opportunity to really explore the inner canyon and experience the diversity that this place has to offer. This park has a broad elevational change. So as you descend into the canyon, for every 1,000 feet, you actually gain 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. So at the river's edge, the temperature can be 15 to 25 degrees warmer than on the South Rim. You leave behind the forests, which are more typical of the Rim environments, and you enter into a landscape filled with blackbrush and cacti, plants that are more typical of and adapted to a desert environment. Traveling further into the inner canyon, you arrive at the Colorado River, and along its edge, you will find a very critical riparian habitat that extends the length of the river itself. We have seeps and springs nestled inside canyons that have a variety of species that are dependent on them. The diversity in the springs alone is unparalleled to any other location in the park. Almost 94% of the park is proposed wilderness. As such, it is managed and protected as though it is wilderness. In Grand Canyon's wilderness, you won't find cars. It's a roadless area where natural quiet is protected. There are places where you can descend below the canyon, where the air is still, where you have only yourself and the rocks around you and the plants, and suddenly your senses become tuned to the lizards scurrying in the rocks or the sounds of the canyon wren or the dripping of the springs. Those are the experiences that are wild. Evidence of human life in Grand Canyon extends back thousands of years. Some of our first explorers arrived on the rim, peered down into the canyon as so many people do today, but they saw it as an impassable chasm. They saw it as lifeless, undesirable, a place that no one would ever visit intentionally. These expeditions opened up the opportunity for artists and photographers to capture the imagery of Grand Canyon and share it with the nation and ultimately the world, which really helped to bring about our appreciation for the scenic value of this landscape. Most importantly, what the Grand Canyon has to teach all of us is to slow down, to take it all in, to get to know what is beyond the reaches of the road and look deep within the canyon itself and find that sense of discovery in yourself and that sense of wildness in this place. It's the canyon itself that brings together the human history and the science. It's not just a canyon, it's the grandest canyon. There are deeper, there are wider, there are longer canyons, but none of them are the Grand Canyon.