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PARKS
Grand Canyon National Park
Arizona
The Grand Canyon has been touted as the Eighth Wonder of the World ever since John Wesley Powell braved the raging whitewater in its depths in 1869. It's inarguably the most overexposed icon of the American landscape—every year, 5 million people come to gawk into the abyss, and you have to wonder if the millions of rolls of film shot here through the generations might come close to filling the canyon from river to rim.
Grand Canyon National Park
Photo © John Clet Jones
Greater West Images
Yet no matter how jaded you might feel after years of seeing postcards, snapshots, and IMAX movies of the Grand Canyon, or for having been stuck in the slow-moving traffic of a South Rim-bound caravan of RVs, the Big Ditch's power to move first-time visitors is inescapable. That first view of this mighty gouge in the skin of the earth will hit with the force and surprise of a heavyweight's sucker punch. Its scale and topography is that overwhelming.
For many, the views alone are worth the price of admission. But adventurers won't—and shouldn't—be satisfied with looking. Whether hiking down below the rim, floating through the Colorado River's alternating series of hair-raising rapids and cathedral-still quiet water, or marveling at the touch of 2-billion-year-old rock under your fingers, it's interacting with this landscape that induces what writer Barry Lopez has called a unique "state of awe."
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