The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher

Author:Colin Fletcher [Fletcher, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5244-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

The day before I reached Phantom Ranch, signs of man began to appear. Hermit Camp was a derelict dude ranch dry-rotting back into the desert. Just beyond it I passed the first Park Service sign I had seen since Supai. Soon, more fossils-in-the-making: a length of frayed and sun-bleached rope, a horseshoe, a rusty iron stove peacefully disintegrating. Before long, even a telephone line swinging incongruously down toward Indian Garden (where the Havasupai in their vital days seem to have encamped occasionally, and where the Tonto Trail crosses the busy tourist trail that runs from the Rim to Phantom Ranch).

Now, when I looked up at the Rim, I knew in some disjointed and rather tenuous sense that a hardtop road ran along its lip. Up there, I half accepted, tourists were stepping out of their cars to have their minds exploded beyond old boundaries by their first sight of the Canyon—or to glance at the view and then check their watches to see if the hotel had begun to serve lunch yet.

A couple more hours and I was walking—partly clothed now, and resenting it—through tourist-trampled dust. Next, a crumpled Hershey bar wrapper. Then, as I came in sight of the green foliage of Indian Gardens, the whine of a powerhouse. Finally, a man sitting on a stone, taking off his boots.

I followed the broad and dusty mule trail down to the Colorado and crossed a suspension bridge. And that evening I dined at a table, off plates, and chatted with other visitors to Phantom Ranch—the only tourist resort still operating in the Canyon, the only surviving remnant of a process that a hairy malcontent from Indiana had set in motion seventy years before when he led the first party of tourists down his trail to the waiting cable car or ferried them across the river from the quiet little bay in which he had beached his rowboat.

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