On May 29th, 2022 (the year of our lord) I hiked from the North Rim to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. That’s about 24.5 miles of hiking. 65k+ steps. We, a group that included my Dad, my brother, my brother’s partner, and Steve and Julie - two of my adopted indomitable badass family members - started at just after 3am. I finished hiking around 8:30pm.
I won’t say that I killed it, or that knocked it out of the park. I didn’t. My Dad, Steve, and Julie finished hours ahead of me. I struggled mightily over the last 9ish miles, and especially over the last 4.5. The uphill parts. I did finish though. I didn’t need to be rescued by a park ranger, or helicoptered out or whatever. I made it out on my own two legs. The generous mental and emotional support of Zach and Mimi - my brother and his partner - also helped push me over that final hump.
In the most American popular aesthetics Minimalism is king. Clean simple lines dominate art, architecture, clothing and a hundred other things. Wide swathes of muted color, with perhaps just one or two accents. Single patterns. That wild house Kanye designed is an example of this to the extreme.
The Grand Canyon is the opposite of that. The Grand Canyon is Maximalist. An infinite variety of shapes, colors, patterns, and scenery all crammed together in one of the largest and oldest places on Earth. Maximalism is the Grand Canyon experience.
I thought about a lot of things during my hike. Most of those thoughts are not worth mentioning. They usually revolved around some piece of rhyming doggerel that I repeated to myself to keep my legs moving. They weren’t all like that though. The one thing that I kept coming back to was Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. I’ve written about this particular painting before on this here blog.
At first glance Bosch’s masterpiece looks nothing like the Grand Canyon. Bosch’s Garden is full of people, fantastical creatures, greenery, and water. It depicts a lush place. Take a second glance though, or just be in the midst of an exercise induced delirium, and you’ll start to see some similarities. The Grand Canyon is an arid place, but it is not lifeless. It contains many species of hearty plants, animals, and other amazing flora and fauna. In my time in the Canyon, I saw two rattlesnakes, a bunch of various lizards, squirrels, and countless cacti. The Colorado River runs through the canyon allowing for even moss, the most lushest of plants, to grow in some places.
Those are just surface level things. The real similarities come at a different level. To wit, both The Grand Canyon and The Garden of Earthly Delights are maximalist masterpieces.
Take The Garden of Earthly Delights. There a million things going on in this piece. Most of it is above my head. But there is both a metaphorical and representational depth here, things lurk in every corner, something new surprises you at every turn. Most importantly though it all fits together. Maximalism is not about just throwing a bunch of junk at a wall and seeing what sticks. It’s about throwing a bunch of junk at a wall in a very precise and orderly manner.
The same is true of the Grand Canyon. There are no simple clean lines anywhere in the National Park. No simple shapes, or empty monochrome swathes. It is a busy place. Dust devils swirl, pink rattlesnakes slither along paths, scrub brush, cactus, and wild grasses litter the landscape.
There is a depth to it. This is how it should be. The Grand Canyon holds some of the oldest rocks in the world. Pre-Cambrian stones formed about 1.8 billion years ago. Something that old will never be minimal or clean. It needs to be surrounded with secrets, with death, with discovery. It needs to be surrounded with the infinite.
I’m using a lot of active verbs here, presenting billions of years of geological activity as having a conscious, knowing hand in the creation of the Grand Canyon. Walking through it you have a hard time shaking that idea. Now having some sort of religious epiphany while hiking is trite beyond belief, and I don’t want to make it seem as if that happened to me, it didn’t. But, and there is that pesky but, it’s hard not to look at something as huge, as complex, as maximalist, as the Grand Canyon and not see bigger things at work.
That’s really where I think the power of maximalism, the power of the Grand Canyon, comes from. It makes you think on scales much bigger and longer than you usually might. When looking at the Grand Canyon, and The Garden of Earthly Delights - can’t forget what I hung this article on - you’re forced to reckon with the enormity of the universe. You don’t need to have answer, and the Grand Canyon most certainly will not offer one, but you’ll still need to think about it. Thinking about our place in the world in that manner is something I need to do more.
As I write this, my calves hurt, I’m still tired, and if you saw me walk up a flight of stairs you’d probably die laughing. But that’s fine. If that my only punishment for getting a chance to walk among the infinite then I’ll take it.