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WONDERS OF NATURE
Grand Canyon. Nature miracle
"... The first sensation is that you see a dream. A failure of terrifying proportions! The other bank of the failure is visible through the thickness of the air and therefore is slightly smoky, shrouded in blue of the same density. Fifteen kilometers separate the edges of the failure. You cannot see a person on the other side. matches. And the depth... You can't see the bottom of the Canyon. The Ostankino tower would be white in this opening like a barely perceptible needle. People would not be able to dig such a "ditch" even if they dug it with the whole world and from the first week of its history. This fun could only nature can afford it, and it took ten million years." This is how journalist and traveler Vasily Peskov describes his acquaintance with the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.
Indeed, the scale of this gaping abyss is hard to even imagine: the length of this colossal gorge is more than five hundred kilometers, and the depth reaches one thousand eight hundred meters! The width of the canyon ranges from six to twenty kilometers, and in one place it even narrows to eight hundred meters. At the bottom, the walls of the abyss gradually converge closer, and at the bottom the width of the Colorado Valley is only a hundred meters. No description can convey the grandeur of the most gigantic crevice on our planet. It is also impossible to take a photograph that would adequately depict the entire gigantic, incredible bottomlessness and infinity of this unique "ravine". Yes, yes, if you look at the Grand Canyon through the eyes of a geologist, it is just a huge, largest ravine on Earth, the result of centuries of water erosion. When ten million years ago the plain along which the Colorado River flowed began to heave under the influence of underground forces, the water flow began to crash into the plateau. Moreover, an extremely fortunate coincidence occurred: the river bit into the rocks at the same speed with which the terrain rose. As a result, by our time the depth of the cut was almost two kilometers. Millions of tons of stone were carried by the mad current of the Colorado into the sea before the Grand Canyon formed. And this turned out to be within the power of the river, primarily because of its very fast flow (before the construction of a hydroelectric station in the upper reaches of the Colorado, its speed reached thirty kilometers per hour!), And also due to the fact that the rocks of the canyon - limestones, sandstones and shales - were soft enough. Now at the bottom of the gorge, the most ancient rocks have already come out - granites, the destruction of which is much slower, especially since the speed of the river has now decreased. The vast expanse of the Grand Canyon does not look like just a long narrow hole in the ground. It is filled with a disorderly accumulation of remnant cliffs, here called "temples". The remains have the most bizarre shape and really often resemble intricate Indian or Indonesian temples, Japanese pagodas, ancient towers, domes and fortress walls. This whole diverse stone labyrinth, like the gigantic walls of the Canyon, is lined with colored layers of sedimentary rocks that make up the plateau and liken "temples" to high-rise buildings with alternating yellow, pink, red, brown and brown floors. The grandeur of this silent fabulous city can only be appreciated by descending from the Colorado Plateau down to the red-brown waters of the Colorado running along the bottom of the canyon. (The name of the river itself is translated from Spanish and means "red".) Here you also feel the fury and power of the elements, which was able to saw through such a giant gap in the stone armor of the ancient plateau. The river now, even tamed above the canyon by a dam, rushes along it at a speed of twenty kilometers per hour, rolling huge boulders and pebbles along the bottom and carrying so much sand and clay that its water is absolutely opaque. Stones and sand carried by the river multiply the destructive effect, and even the strongest granites of the canyon bed are rubbed with this "emery" annually by a quarter of a millimeter. During the day, Colorado carries half a million tons of clay, sand and stones. It is clear that such a "digging machine" could dig such a "ditch" as the Grand Canyon in millions of years. Of the Europeans, the first to see the gorge in 1540 was a certain Coronado, an officer of one of the detachments of the Spanish conquistador Cortes. The Spaniards were unable to descend into the canyon and returned back to Mexico. Only more than two centuries later, the next guest from across the ocean appeared on the shore of the canyon - the Franciscan monk Garsos. But it took almost a hundred years, until in 1869 an expedition led by Major Powell for the first time managed to pass the Grand Canyon by boat and draw up its first scientific description. This journey was a real feat. With no maps and no experience of sailing in such incredibly difficult conditions, Powell and his companions overcame more than two hundred rapids and safely reached the Gulf of California, where the Colorado flows into. Now those who wish can repeat Powell's voyage without being exposed to such a risk, since large inflatable rafts are now used for rafting. Nevertheless, those who have tested themselves in this difficult water slalom admit that even on an absolutely unsinkable and extremely stable raft, the moment when the rowers diving with the vessel into a three-meter standing wave on the drain from the threshold, the water covers their heads, gives the tourist no less strong sensations, than those experienced by Major Powell. Even in the cinema, the shots when the raft disappears into the boiling and roaring abyss together with people make the heart clench with excitement. Only when, half a minute later, an orange inflatable "watercraft" emerges from the bubbling foam and the heads of the crew members are shown on the surface, the viewer takes a breath of relief and regains the ability to admire the surrounding landscape. Travelers who prefer less sporty methods of exploring nature descend into the Grand Canyon "on foot" along the hiking trails laid out in two places, or they make this dizzying descent on horseback on a mule. If you go without stopping, the route to the bottom of the gorge and back can be overcome in ten hours. But only trained tourists are capable of this. Those who have not calculated their strength will have to use the services of the "rescue service" and get out on horseback or by helicopter. I must say that the climate on the plateau and in the depths of the canyon differs quite sharply. When it is seventeen degrees above, at the beginning of the trail, at the bottom of the gorge, among the red-hot stones, the temperature rises to plus forty. At first glance, the slopes of the Grand Canyon are lifeless, but as the traveler descends, here and there on the sides of the path he finds cacti, junipers, oaks and small pines. Below, their desert relatives - agaves and yuccas - join the cacti, and birches, aspens and willows appear next to the oaks. All this strange mixture of northern and southern flora is also intertwined with wild grapes. Animals also managed to inhabit the seemingly impregnable gorge and lay their paths along its steep slopes. At the bottom, where it is dry and hot, the inhabitants of the desert settled: the spotted skunk, the whip-tailed lizard and the yellow scorpion. And the cooler slopes are home to rocky chipmunks, squirrels and Arizona gray foxes. Occasionally, you can find on the sand the footprint of the "American lion" - a graceful mountain cougar. But the Grand Canyon is not only a kind of zoo and botanical garden. It is also a real geological museum. On its steep, exposed slopes, one can study the evolution of the Earth's nature from ancient Archean times to the Carboniferous and Permian periods. The river bed is cut into dark gray granites and gneisses of the Archean era, which are overlain by red sandstones, shales and lavas. Above successively are horizontal layers of the Cambrian, Devonian and other periods of the Paleozoic era, rich in fossilized remains of animals and plants of those distant times. The color of these rocks is predominantly reddish, but against this background, bluish, gray and green stripes clearly appear. Dense limestones form sheer walls, while shales that break down more easily form gentler, scree-covered slopes. Due to the numerous bends of the river on the slopes and the bottom of the gorge, remnants of the most bizarre form appear - the same "temples" that were mentioned at the beginning. Of course, not only the river was involved in the process of their creation. The wind carrying sharp grains of sand, temperature changes, plant roots - in a word, the most diverse forces have been creating these masterpieces of natural "architecture" for millions of years. The grandiose scale of the canyon and the bizarre "temples" on its slopes create an amazing, simply fantastic sight that attracts many tourists to the Grand Canyon. In addition, the appearance of the gigantic gorge is amazingly changeable. You can come to the canyon dozens of times and each time see it different, different from the previous one. The change in the slope of the sun's rays, the bizarre play of cloud shadows and the sultry haze that affects the color tone, enveloping the far edge of the gorge, again and again change the appearance of a giant failure and fantastic natural buildings rising from the bottom of the abyss and rising to the level of the surface of the plateau. The variegated striped walls of the canyon are constantly changing shades of color in an exquisite range, from black and purplish brown to pale pink and bluish gray. And if we add to this that the Grand Canyon, in fact, is not one: many lateral, no less picturesque, although not so grandiose ones converge to it, it becomes clear that in this case the traveler is dealing with a whole country, amazing and peculiar . It is like a "mountain range in reverse", not raised up, but cut into the thickness of the Colorado Plateau. And the deep parts of this unusual country, decorated with natural temples and obelisks, rapids and waterfalls, colorful cliffs and thickets of cacti and shrubs, invite you to wander through them for a week or two to feel the wild charm of these harsh but beautiful places. And for a long time later the tourist will remember his wanderings along this "corridor" into the depths of geological history, the grandiose walls of the Grand Canyon and the fabulous silent stone city that arose there below to remain in memory as unique, with nothing on The landscape is incomparable to the earth. There are many amazing corners on our planet, many beautiful and unusual creations of nature. But only one of them can be said in the words of the brave Major Powell: "This is the most magnificent sight on Earth." Author: B.Wagner
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