From a sheer cliff, looking southwest, this photograph shows the Green River twisting south through the expansive Soda Springs Basin. This sweep of geologic time is viewed from a flat-topped mesa called Island in the Sky, above eastern Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. Just beyond this view, the Green joins the Colorado River; the vast land in between was carved by the erosive force of these rivers through ancient, accumulated layers of sandstone.

On July 17, 1869, John Wesley Powell, as his boat rounded a bend in the Green River, wrote in his diary, “The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms…in long, gentle curves the river winds about these rocks.” For the next six weeks, he and his historic expedition floated the Colorado River, making the first river traverse through northern Arizona’s Grand Canyon.

Standing a short distance back from the edge, where this picture was taken, the foreground seems to merge into the desert 1300 feet below. Approaching the rim, as others have, I felt the pull of the vast, silent, almost vacuous emptiness beyond. "Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee," Nietzsche said that. He knew.", wrote naturalist Edward Abbey in his ode to this landscape, Desert Solitaire.