Running Away With My Lunch!

The passionate, inexpressibly poignant choiring of a hermit thrush grew vibrant on the fragrant air. So illusively did the first notes penetrate the forest silences, so completely did the ecstatic song cast its magic spell, that it was a long moment before awareness of it jarred the senses. An Audubon hermit singing here-on the rim of Grand Canyon. How could it be? Southward only a hundred yards through sun-patterned, russet-columned boles of the open yellow pine park ran the jagged rinrock, abrupt brink of that arid abyss. Eastward stretched the sterile desert of the Little Colorado; and westward, miles away beyond the Hurricane Cliffs, the halted, jumbled ranges and basins of the Mojave. From the.north, after leaving behind the bright Vermilion Cliffs of Utah, the car bad climbed steadily out of a wide, parched depression up into juniper and pinyon; and next, with the feeling that I had found God's Country again, we had attained the yellow pines.

The road mounted gradually among them, and then leveled off on their needled, sunny floor. And finally the machine rolled almost imperceptibly downward for speeding miles toward the Canyon's spectacular rim. It was the familiar story of life zones, of course. But theories and classifications do not well prepare one for exciting realities. A few Douglas firs strode with the pines as they marched majestically back from the rim. Firs, too, crowded where the gorge of Bright Angel Creek clove the plateau; and silvery aspen clumped not far off about subsurface moisture and seepage springs. Far back, toward the broad crest of the tableland, spruce and alpine fir mingled with the aspen's shimmering groves; and now I recalled that in winter six feet of snow lay deep upon the North Rim. This Kaibab, where a northern chorister sang rapturously from hidden depths of fir, was a mighty, up-faulted plateau-a vast, green "island" of the desert sky! It was June. Among the massive, scaly-plated, rusted trunks of the ponderosa pines, thorny locusts flaunted' another anomaly. Their showy, white or lavender, wisteria and sweet-pea-like blossoms startled the eye. Here were trees delicately flowering a conifer wood, scenting the piny air with even more redolent and seductive perfume!

Everywhere around this exotic land spread the desert. In dizzy Lower Sonoran depths below flourished catclaw, mesquite and yucca. Even Joshua trees fantastically rimmed the neighboring Mojave. Yet up on the dome of the Kaibab, Engelmann spruce and alpine fir told of the high Canadian Zone. And from its cool borders, down blooming, sun-bathed aisles of the Transition forest rang the ecstasy of the silvertongued mountain thrush. There, too, a white-tailed, tuft-eared squirrel was running away with my lunch!