The thing is, I like snow.

I like to see it outline shapes, to dust itself into contours, to change the color of the world both through its contrast and its power to reflect light upwards from the ground. Snow – at least as it comes and goes in our temperate climes – gives us a second version of the world.

None of which goes to explain why I wanted to first see The Grand Canyon in winter.

It wasn’t like I knew the place and was tired of it – “The same old Grand Canyon,” as the jaded children in The Simpsons remark. But certainly I had seen enough pictures of the place before I ever visited there. Those reds and yellows, as well as the ubiquitous and unsatisfactory purple-blue haze of a thousand mediocre photographs, were already in my mind. 

I knew I would soon be standing on the rim and taking my own bad photos, making my own banal observations about width and depth and breadth and height, and remarking – as we all must – that it is indeed one hell of a hole. So I thought snow might make it all a little more memorable.

Really, it all came down to vanity. I wanted to bring home my photos and see folks thumb through them with blasé disregard, until they stopped and said with rising voices, “Is that snow? In The Grand Canyon?” I wanted to smile beneficently as I explained to them that, oh yes, it snows there, don’tcha know, as if any world traveler should know that.

Because for most of us, Arizona is a desert that rises up the map until it all empties at the top into one of the biggest tourist traps in America. In our uninformed imaginations, it goes from sand to rock, without pine forest and mountain in between, and certainly without snow.

So I came and saw the canyon in snow and it was pretty. But it is not white that I best remember. It is black. At 4:30 the next morning, I stood outside my cabin on the rim and looked down into a blackness profound and terrible. At first it seemed solid, and then not even that to help me pretend that it was impenetrable. Above me stars were pale in the paler Milky Way, which I had not reached for since I was a kid, but below me was space without even the cold comfort of inaccessibility. Here was space that I could, with a step, sail into. A short journey or (who knows?) maybe a long one.

Then the moon rose and silver crept down the canyon wall. It caught the tip of a butte in the blackness and, like snow, gave it contour and shape and changed the color of the world. Soon enough the sun rose, and I took those pictures that light allows.