Hey, Ron: I figured you were off to the races again. To a great extent, I am, too. But not as busy as you.

Ron and Ebbie:

I was going to ask Rap if that was him wearing the blue gardenia, but they don't the Grand Canyon "Grand" for nothing. It's 230 something miles long, and many miles wide. Where we were standing on the West Rim, we could look across and see part of the North Rim. If King Kong was on top of the Empire State Building at the edge on the North Rim, we couldn't have seen him. Not only is the North Rim many, many miles away, it's 1,000 feet higher than the West Rim.

There's a wonderful book, out in reprint by Dover, titled The Eyes Of Discovery. It;s a collection of the earliest known written descriptions of America from logs of Christopher Columbus through Journals of the explorers, as they pushed westward. There is a terrific description of an early explorer (I'd have to check the book to get the details) coming upon the Grand Canyon with no concept of how large it is. He describes looking down at the Colorado River, and because he was disoriented by the scale of the canyon, though he could climb down to fill his canteen. That's the way I felt at times, standing on the edge of the canyon. We judge distances in comparison to objects we are familiar with... the road is a lot wider than that sotop sign, or a tree is taller than a house. Those visual comparison pale, standing on the edge of the canyon. At times, the canyon looked vast, but at the same time, it looked smaller than I expected. When I looked at the photographs we took, with someone standing in the foreground, the canyon looked far more vast than it did when I was looking across it, with nothing to give a sense of scale.

I'm surprised that they didn't name it the Purty Danged Big Canyon.

Jerry