Below the edge

It was in early May, but when we were tracking shoe prints in an inch of fresh snow, a breeze blew. Soon after dawn, we parked our car on the desert scenery avenue, passed through the American pine forest and headed for the Grand Canyon, leaving behind the tourist vehicles galloping along the southern edge of the Canyon.

After a mile's hike, the three of us, Greg julia child, photographer Bill Hatcher and I, suddenly appeared from the tree and stood on the limestone headland overlooking the huge gap. It can be predicted that the distant ridges and towers are blurred into soft outlines in the morning fog; The northern edge 20 miles away is shrouded in a storm; The 4,800-foot gap under our feet flooded the raging flood of the Colorado River.

But we didn't enjoy the scenery.

We left this point in a hurry and slid on the boulder when we lost our height. A few hundred feet away from the edge, we were stopped by a rock falling nearly 10 feet. We tied a rope to a bush of serviceberry, then slipped off the rope and left it where it was until we came back.

We went through the limestone-covered rocks of Kebab in the canyon, and then landed on the 400-foot-high sandstone cliff of Coconino. For miles on both sides, the gray-orange rock belt is too steep to descend, but the bow itself is divided into sharp steps. We took the route of least resistance, sidestepped the tower and crossed the groove, and the empty soles reminded us of the consequences of slipping. We face inward and slowly move from one hand and one foot to the other. All three of us are experienced climbers, but the terrain is difficult, because any of us dare to climb without ropes and hardware. Just when this "route" might disappear, Greg, who was in the leading position, put his foot into a round hole, which gave him enough money to keep his balance. The other hole is connected to his other six feet. I told you. From wandering in the southwest for many years, we know that these subtle depressions are man-made. More than seven centuries ago, some brave acrobats threw stones harder than sandstone at them.

So in the next 90 minutes, the road seemed to disappear, and the early pioneers built a platform here or carved several footholds there. Finally, we came to a broad saddle, which is located between the bow of the rapids and a lonely bow in the north. When we were sitting there for lunch, we found red, gray and white flint fragments scattered in the soil of an arrow manufacturing workshop.

Bill looked up at the route we had just landed. If we stumble across it from below, we may well think it is impossible. "Great, isn't it? He can only say. But what is this road for, and what culture that has long since disappeared created it? "

The Grand Canyon occupies such a huge position in the public imagination that we can forgive ourselves for thinking that we "know" it. More than 4 million tourists visit the canyon every year, and the National Park Service sends the vast majority of tourists into the canyon through a neat wooden frame, which is limited to the tourist attractions on the relatively short southern edge. Even people who have never visited the biggest natural wonder in America have seen so many panoramic photos from the Grand View or Cape Mather that they seem to be familiar with this place.

However, the canyon is a vast and unknown place (the national park alone covers an area of about 1902 square miles, which is about the size of Delaware), and it is difficult to enter (the vertical drop varies from 3000 feet to 6000 feet). The geological layers of the rift valley are not less than 15, ranging from Kaibabu limestone at the top of the margin (250 million years ago) to Vishnu schist at the bottom of the river (2 billion years ago). The Grand Canyon is the most ecologically diverse national park in the United States. It has so many microclimates that hikers can trudge through the snowdrift on the northern edge, while river runners in Colorado below enjoy sunbathing in shorts. The most profound one is its prehistory of who lived here, when, how and why. At first glance, the Colorado River is the most abundant and reliable water source in southwest China, and the Grand Canyon seems to be the perfect place for ancient people to live. However, before the river was dammed, it caused a series of disasters. The flood flooded the river bank and washed away the alluvial terraces where ancient people might live and farm. Due to the size and geological diversity of the canyon, it lacks all kinds of natural pits that prehistoric colonists tend to build villages. As Bill, Greg and I discovered on the morning of May, sailing can be very difficult. Janet Bahlsen, an archaeologist with the National Park Service, said, "The canyon has a lot to offer, but you have to work hard for it." . "This is really a marginal environment."

However, the Grand Canyon is full of prehistoric remains, most of which extend from the edge to the river bed. Some of them are obvious. For example, the improved route of park service has become a hiking route similar to "Angel of Light" and "South Kaibabu Trail". Most of the others are unknown. Archaeologists basically left them to some enthusiastic climbers to explore.

For example, the archaeology of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico or other southwest areas of Mesa Verde, Colorado, has produced a more comprehensive picture describing the situation about 1000 years ago. Bahlsen said, "You must remember that only 3.3% of the Grand Canyon has been investigated, let alone excavated." Only in the past 50 years, archaeologists have focused on the Grand Canyon, and sometimes they have to have helicopter support to dig in such a remote place. Until recently, their efforts have achieved many results. "

Broadly speaking, archaeological evidence shows that human beings have been roaming in the canyon for more than 8000 years. Before 6500 BC, the darkest hints in ancient India were rock art and handicrafts from the vivid but mysterious flowering period of ancient hunters (6500- 1250 BC). With the discovery of corn planting methods, in about 1000 BC, the former nomadic people began to build semi-permanent villages on the terraces of the canyon. After 2000, by the year of 1000, at least three different ethnic groups had thrived in the canyon, but their identities and lifestyles were still unclear. From 1 150 to 1400, the whole canyon may have been abandoned for some time. We can only guess why.

Today, only a group of Native Americans, Vasu people, live in the canyon. Although their elders can recite the origin story unscrupulously, the puzzles brought by this tribe to anthropologists are as annoying as those attached to the disappeared ancients.

The gap in the timeline, the lost contact between one person and another, the confused experts, they just slowly illuminate the life that lived on the edge a long time ago.

The Grand Canyon frustrated western explorers from the beginning. The first European to see it was the immortal separatist party entrada of Francisco Vá zquez de coronado in the southwest during the period of 1540- 1542. Their client sent them to follow a rumor about "a big river" in the west. A Hopi informant told them: "After walking along the river for a few days, some people are very big."

Led by four Hopi, the team led by Guillermo García López de Cá rdenas took 20 days to reach the Grand Canyon, at least twice as long as it should have. Obviously, the Hopi led Caldenas' people around a long way and moved them out of the fragile village.

Caldenas' guide took the soldiers to a place not far from the south. On the morning of May 2005, the three of us slipped off the cliff and chose a path that did not lead to the canyon. The Spanish misjudged the size of the canyon and thought that the river was only six feet wide, not more than one hundred yards. Cá rdenas sent his three most agile reptiles across the edge to find the way down the mountain, but in three days, they only walked a third of the way down the mountain. They came back and reported that it was impossible to go down the mountain. Caldenas hoped to find a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean. He turned angrily.

The first American explorer to reach the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River was Captain Joseph Ives, a government surveyor, who completed the task in 1858 under the guidance of Hualapai Indians. He is not happier than Caldenas. He swore in the official report that the whole area was "worthless". This judgment did not prevent John Wesley Powell from boating along the Colorado River in 1869, nor did it prevent a wave of miners from invading the canyon in 1880, nor did it establish the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908 and the country in19.

1933, workers of three civil defense regiments built a path in the canyon and rested for a day to explore a remote cave. When they were looking for Indian things in it, they later told the boss that they had found three statues, each made of willow branches. These artifacts, each less than a foot high, seem to be hidden in one of the most inaccessible niches.

Since then, more than 500 such statues have been found. On a windy and rainy day, Bill, Greg and I stopped in front of the collection of the Grand Canyon National Park Museum. Curator Colleen Hyde took out a dozen statues of these branched branches from their storage drawers.

Their lengths range from 1 inch to 1 1 inch, but they are all made in the same way. Each artist takes a wicker or skunk, splits it longitudinally until only one end is fixed together, and then folds the two ends together until the second one can be stuffed into the first formed package. The result seems to be portraits of deer or bighorn sheep, both of which may be important food sources.

In recent years, many statues have been carbon dated from 2900 BC to 1250 BC-just in the late ancient times in this area. Except for a pair of broken bullet points, they are the oldest cultural relics found in the Grand Canyon. Ancient hunter-gatherers, in the near17th century, or from late Roman statues to Jackson Pollock.

In the whole southwest region, only two regions have made statues of split branches, and they have not found corn, pottery or bows and arrows yet. A canyon-centered cluster in southeastern Utah consists of portraits packaged in different ways, producing animals with different appearances, which only exist in the family environment, including garbage dumps. However, all the statues of the Grand Canyon are found in deep caves in the red-walled limestone stratum, which is the most difficult geological stratum to climb in the canyon because its steep cliffs lack handles and footholds. In these caves, these objects were placed under flat rocks or small Keynes, and the site of Qingpanying was never found. There is no evidence that ancient people once lived in these caves, and some caves are difficult to enter, so modern climbers have to use ropes and hardware to complete them. (Because there must be dozens or even hundreds of figurines that have not been found, the Park Service forbids exploring caves with red walls if anyone dares to try. )

But no one knows why these statues were made, although some hunting magic has always been the main hypothesis. We see in the museum's collection that there are several branches inserted into sheep or deer, like spears or darts.

In a paper in 2004, Utah archaeologists Nancy J. Cullen and Allen R schroder cited ethnographic similarities with Australian aborigines and other hunter-gatherers, arguing that these statues were fetuses, and then, more seriously, "If it was up to us, we would never let the miners go down from here."

Tilus told us that this tourist camp, built by the Park Service 1974 years ago, is located in "the place where we once cremated our people". He stroked the goat and said nonsense, "Sometimes seeing the campsite makes me feel uneasy, but we need the help of tourists." . Then the government said, you can't do this anymore. So now we must bury the dead like everyone else.

We stopped beside a huge poplar tree, and Tilus pointed to a high cliff in the west. "See the two white dots above?" Through binoculars, I saw a pair of white alkaline stripes, which were formed by water seepage on the rosy cliff and seemed inaccessible under the edge of the cliff in the distance. "Those are two ears of corn, which were put there by the creator," Tirusi said. "We pray to them and ask enough."

Tirusi admits that the Weller mat at Vasu Pass is just a facade. Archaeologists once asked Ha Vasu to explain these "rock words"-he insisted that he even took chisels on some rock painting panels, but people objected. He said, "We don't think we should tell anyone except ourselves" what rock art means. "We don't know what you want to do with this knowledge."

Visitors without a guide are not allowed to explore the canyon outside the main road leading to the waterfall, so the next day we hired two Vasu worshippers in their thirties. The amiable Benji Jones has the figure of a sumo wrestler; Damon Vatahomi has a thinner waist, sharper expression and rich knowledge. We only walked 15 minutes, and he stopped and pointed to a stone on the west side of our head. "Have you seen the frog?" He asked. The knob really looks like a frog ready to jump.

"The story is that when all the water recedes, people live in Vika Salabi Valley, which is on your map," Watahomigie said. "Because of the new era, everything is dying. At that time, we were not people, we were animals and insects. The boss asked the frog to go out and find a place where we can start over. Frogs jumped around until they finally found this place. He can hear the Colorado River.

We craned our necks to stare at the rocks in the distance. "It's like Noah stood up," Vatahomiji concluded.

In search of rock art, we left the path and climbed a steep slope blocked by bushes and cacti. Jones made a leaf with an oily dark red paste made of hematite or iron oxide, which is usually used by Native Americans for painting. As one of the most precious materials of Vasu School, hematite was found in the valley east of Mississippi River. In prehistoric times, the trade of this material was as long as 1000 miles.

Jones dipped his finger in the paste and drew a stripe on each of our soles. "Keep rattlesnakes away," he explained. "As time went on, we crossed the canyon, and the tour guide took us to the rock paintings and ruins that few tourists saw. Several tour guides won't let us visit. " We shouldn't disturb those closed people, "watahomige said. The word "closed", I thought he meant the slate door was intact.

His caution implies that cliff architecture is the work of early people. Archaeologists have been arguing about the origin of Ha Vasu School for half a century, which is fierce and uncertain. Some people insist that a man named Kouonina became Havasubai. Others believe that the Ha Vasu School and their linguistic relatives, the Huala School and the Yawa School, are what they call Sbat people, who came from great basin, Nevada after 1350.

Like many other Native Americans, the Vasu people usually say that they will live in the place where they live forever. But when we asked Tirusi how long his people had lived in the blue-green canyon, he didn't go that far. He said, "I wasn't here billions of years ago." I can't describe the past years with numbers. I just want to say, because