The canyon, grand, pulls me back.
Nine times I have loaded a heavy pack
and hiked—down, down, down for days.
There is beauty, yes, but there is more.
It is a journey through deep time.
Reaching with my right hand, my fingers brush
the fine sand of windblown dunes built
hundreds of millions of years ago.
And my left? On some of this canyon’s trails,
my left hand extends over an abyss of hundreds of feet.
That moment, right hand upon a carved crossbed, left in thin air,
demands my attention be as firm as my boots upon the narrow track.

I must stop, if I’m to admire a mud crack preserved for more than a billion years.
I must stop, if I’m to take in the dangerously steep and stunningly beautiful walls
of sculpted schists formed nearly two billion years ago.
I must stop, to let my heartrate slow from the climb, but quicken in amazement.

One partner, decades ago, was paralyzed by the realization that she could fall and disappear
in the vastness. But for me, that realization—my smallness in the canyon’s immensity in space
and time—feels freeing.
Starting the descent, this ninth time, in the chill air of an October morning, I walked with two others.
Partners who relished the realization as much as I. Those days with them, with our focus (on paths
along precipices), with our awe (at the enormity), with our appetites (could reconstituted freeze-dried
green chile mac and cheese taste so good anywhere else?), with our laughter and our sighs, along with
the Canyon wrens’ songs and Canyon frogs’ chirps, a concerto of companionship of women walking
together in this world.