Like all who know and love the North Rim, I’ve been stunned into silence these past weeks, grieving all that is gone. I awoke this morning with a new thought: If there’s one thing Grand Canyon has taught me in our fifty-year relationship, it is to take the long view of time. The magnificent North Rim forest that Clarence Dutton back in 1882 called “the most beautiful and grand in America” has burned before, much of it since he wrote those words, and regenerated into the forest that we have walked within and wondered at. So will today’s blackened forest grow green and tall in time. Stuck as we are in human time, it’s a small comfort—but I’ll take whatever I can get.
Rick K
Deep Wild Journal 