Images from a long summer on the rocks

I remember two things about my first visit to the Grand Canyon. The first is we all got in trouble. By “we” I mean the four oldest of the Connor children who were deemed old enough to know better than to go over the barrier along the rim. The second is the layers in the rocks, all the way to the bottom, thousands of feet below.

The idea that the Colorado River carved its way to the impossibly deep bottom was clear enough, yet still hard to imagine. That had taken 6 million years. What wasn’t so clear then is that the youngest of the rocks the river had cut through—the limestone/marble of the Kaibab Formation—are more than 250 million years old. That’s about 3.5 million human lifetimes. There’s no need to run the math for the deepest rocks in the chasm, the 1.7+ billion year old gneiss, schists and granites that make up the Vishnu Formation. At that trench of time, we are so deeply into the unfathomable that the mind twists and spins.

I can’t well explain the comfort I receive being in the presence of very old rocks. It’s just better—here—that I not try, that I just let the rocks speak for themselves in the photographs. Most of the images are from travels in the summer and fall of 2021, often with some of my favorite people, children and dear friends who allow me to just climb and wander up and down range from time to time, to visit with the earth and the rocks, and the ever-changing light. —tjc

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