Seeing the Rio Grande Gorge for the First Time

I'm sitting here with a broken leg thinking about all of the places I want to go -- trails I want to hike, boulders I want to climb, views I want to see and feel as if I were the first to see them.

But of course there are very many places that I've seen but never actually witnessed, places I went to but did not explore, where I visited but where I was never fully present.

One of those places is the Rio Grande Gorge, the canyon just south of Taos that's so knee-bucklingly deep that whenever I've seen it in person, all I've been able to think is that it's too big to see. St. Augustine once wrote that God was too big for language; I've discovered that Nature is often too big for my eyes.

Rio Grande Gorge (BLM)

Standing at a point like the rim of the Gorge -- or the Bright Angel Trail at the Grand Canyon, or under the Mesa Arch at Canyonlands -- I have found myself transfixed. Less enraptured than trapped by the enormity of it all; it leaves me motionless, aphasic. I will sit for the better part of an hour, trying to take it all in. I wish the inside of my skull was lined with Kodachrome to preserve the scene forever, not left to the faulty impressions of memory. I want to be able to capture it, and study it later. But this is wanting, not appreciating.

In the case of the Gorge, at least, I also never bothered to learn anything about the place. When it was made part of an expansive national monument last week, I found out that it's not only home to world-class whitewater and millions of years of geological history splayed open for us to read, it also hosts thousands of archaeological sites spanning 9,500 years.

Petroglyphs at Rio Grande Gorge (BLM)

Clustered around the heads of hot springs are petroglyphs from the Archaic Period, painstakingly pecked in the canyon's basalt faces. Remnants of pit houses can still be found, flint-knapping middens, and other signs of life left by those who hewed a living at the river's edge. For them, the canyon probably wasn't just a spectacle, a view to struggle with.

I think that knowing this, and exploring these sites for myself the next time I visit, may help me to see the Gorge more fully. Perhaps I'll be able to see the place through those whose eyes were big enough to apprehend it all.