Grand Canyon National Park - The Redwall
Near a furious place called 24 1/2-mile Rapid, the gorge begins once more to close in. From here on, the river bucks and spews often, slicing down between hard, polished walls that arise fairly quickly, lifting the overlaying shale to a great height. They are of a strange stone, patterned and burnished, sometimes contorted by erosion into odd forms. It is the marble for which the whole of Marble Gorge was named by Maj. John Wesley Powell during his epic river journey. But the great explorer-scientist was mistaken; that is not marble but hard limestone some 300 to 345 million years old, the fossil accumulation from the bed of yet another shallow sea. Although the limestone is actually blue-gray, its surface is stained and mottled with runoff from the shales above, and so it is called Redwall Limestone.
It is in the firm, majestic corridors of the Redwall -- shimmering with many tones of red, pink, and orange, underlain with brooding hints of deeper colors -- that one begins to feel swallowed up, truly cut off from the flimsy world above, as much a part of the age-old interplay of rock and water as are the fossil seashells that the river has laid bare. There are caverns, caves, and occasional side canyons, and agin and again there are rapids in the river. But the crashing white water no longer seems a foreign element; it is an integral part of the only reality that now exists, forever dashing itself into frothy spume against the seemingly eternal rock.
About halfway through Marble Gorge, where the redwall cliffs are hundreds of feet high, is a spot that Powell described for all time: "The river turns sharply to the east," he wrote, "and seems enclosed by a wall, set with a million brilliant gems.... On coming nearer, we find fountains bursting from the rock, high overhead, and the spray in the sunshine forms the gems which bedeck the wall. The rocks below the fountain are covered with mosses, and ferns, and many beautiful flowering plants. We name it Vasey's Paradise, in honor of the botanist who traveled with us last year."
About 4,000 years ago, probably as part of a hunting ceremony, someone made figurines of animals -- either deer or bighorn sheep -- from split willow twigs, and then pierced them with miniature spears. The figurines were left buried under rocks in a deep cave near this place, 100 feet up the canyon walls, and there they remained until quite recently. They are the earliest signs yet found of humans in the canyon.
A short way downstream are niches 800 feet up in the Redwall cliff were the Anasazi of nine centuries ago stored grain. From about A.D. 500, their people -- relatives of the "Ancient Ones" who built the great cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde -- lived on both rims of the Grand Canyon. As the centuries passed and their civilization flourished, the population grew into the hundreds. They built homes and storehouses along the canyon walls. Crops of corn, beans, and squash filled every plantable plot. But sometime after A.D. 1150 they vanished from the Grand Canyon, as they did from dozens of places throughout the Colorado Plateau.