“I took the map and improved it, and I did not get on the Survey. But how Holmes, who could make the most stunning direct watercolors, should have preferred this sort of drudgery was beyond me mentally and artistically.” (Joseph Pennell in The Adventures of an Illustrator [Boston, 1925]), as quoted in Wallace Stegner’s classic history of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian [Houghton Mifflin, 1954]).
It takes time, this rendering of a canyon from shadows and depths — translating unfathomable time, the winnowing of wind, freeze and thaw into sketches that invigorate landscape otherwise defined by adventure route maps and myth makers.
The work is not for everyone, as Joseph Pennell, another renowned illustrator of the late 1800s, acknowledged in his memoir, and Wallace Stegner further explored in the book I quoted above. Most of W. H. Holmes’s contemporaries romanticized, dramatized and otherwise ‘improved’ canyon geology into caricature, with only a few photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Jack Hillers managing to translate grand reality to prints. Many attempts can become “What’s wrong in this picture?” puzzle boards for experienced canyon wanderers. Fun, but not much to learn.
Fine artists such as Thomas Moran, who’d seen the canyons and mountains first-hand, couldn’t resist adding romantic flourishes that obscure details, and even John Wesley Powell’s first account of his party’s Colorado River exploration, published in 1874 as he attempted to raise money for future explorations of the Colorado Plateau, was embellished with details and adventures from a second trip in 1871-72. Powell soon turned the results of his explorations into a multi-decade US government career interpreting the geology, topography and inhabitants of the drylands and beyond, while advocating for his vision of developing the region’s economy to match its limitations. Many others have followed a similar path with varying understandings of reality and romance, at times producing drastic results. Finally, in 1954 Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian translated drama and myth into a near-geologic examination of J. W. Powell’s life and times, and it is still a seminal text for understanding where and how the dryland country came to be promoted, exploited, and overly populated to its present state of fearful planning and dread-filled predictions.
W. H. Holmes began life in Ohio, arriving in Washington, D. C. to study as an artist in 1871, as the country turned its attentions from civil war to surveying the lands west of the Great Plains. He soon hired on as an illustrator with F. V. Hayden for a trip through Yellowstone country, and developed his interests in art, cartography, archaeology, and geology into a lifelong career — serving various stints with the US Geological Survey, Smithsonian Institution, Field Museum and US Bureau of Ethnology, while producing hundreds of paintings of various media that fit pretty well within the protocols of late 1800s American artistic styles. In the 1870s and 1880s, he also produced a series of topographical drawings later used to illustrate publications based on the surveys of Hayden, of Powell, and of Clarence Dutton’s The Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, first printed in 1882. Holmes’s illustrations are the product of long days with pencil and paper along canyon rims, some while maintaining a fire on the ground between his feet to ward off sub-zero temperatures (again according to Pennell). The image below is from the Dutton atlas:
Almost 100 years after W.H. Holmes rendered metamorphic, volcanic and sedimentary layers onto paper with a pencil, a young artist with more confidence than skill arrived at a lip of the Grand Canyon, portable easel over his shoulder, brushes and paints in a bag on his back, determined to try his hand at the task. I had yet to read John Wesley Powell or Wallace Stegner, was still ignorant of most of the visual artists who’d passed before me. A few years before, I’d walked miles along the South Rim, hiked a few below rim trails, and had met R. D. Braught, an old-fashioned manager of the shuttle/tour bus system who’d offered me a job if I ever wanted one. One spring when I was tired of a job and its city, I called to see if the offer was still good. It was.
I scored a night shift, and with the energy of youth I’d sleep a few hours after parking my bus, and then greet the sunrise somewhere along or below the rim trails, at first trying earnestly to translate what I saw, but often to sit quietly as ravens, swallows, and raptors played air currents just below my perch, watching shafts of light probe shadows and reveal canyons and pinnacles. Before season’s end, I had put artist paraphernalia aside for solitary hikes and scrambles into regions best left to the imaginations of scofflaws and their nemeses, the duly offended generations of National Park Service enforcement rangers.
For the next 25 years, I hiked and explored side canyons and routes into what I referred to as ‘The Canyon,’ sometimes leading others to places where I hoped they would feel their own version of grandeur, at least long enough to let them reconsider life goals and desires. On some of these trips, I stopped by the home and studio of one of the few artists whose work approaches the geologic art of William Henry Holmes. At the time, Bruce Aiken, his wife Mary and their three young children lived at the Roaring Springs Pumphouse on the North Kaibab trail. The kids set up a lemonade stand for passing hikers, and the entire family made friends of strangers easily, likely a good thing when living within a few yards of one of The Canyon’s busiest trails. Bruce’s day job was as the pumphouse and pipeline caretaker, but his life work has been a series of paintings, mostly of the Grand Canyon and the forests above it in meticulous detail, with an understanding of the effects of light and shadow that can only come with deep attention. In a later life reflection he said, “The Canyon is a place with unlimited nature, and painting it is a never-ending topic. It’s very essence is nature out of control in a powerful way.” Many Bruce Aiken paintings are available to view in a slide-show on his website, and they are a powerful vicarious conduit into one of the most spectacular places on our planet. A book, Bruce Aiken’s Grand Canyon: An Intimate Affair was published in 2007.
As yearly visitation to Grand Canyon National Park ballooned and the contemplative adventures I and others had partaken of were largely replaced by selfie-stick-wielding social media ‘influencers’ in the popularized imagination (along with the occasional inadvertent misstep into the abyss below), I’ve taken a multi-year break from walking the trails of our nation’s most-visited scenic wonders. But the drawings and paintings of Holmes and Aiken, the words of Powell and Stegner easily transport me below the cliffs, and down shadowed canyons to the river below. As winter settles in on the Colorado Plateau, I highly recommend the journey.
Check some links below for more details and images, and link your friends to these stories if you like. Up next, Down the River with Georgie — until then, take care of yourself, and help somebody else along the way. - B.
A short history of William Henry Holmes from the Smithsonian Institution, with a large gallery of his paintings.
Bruce Aiken’s bio and more image galleries.
A profile of the Aiken family that should intrigue anyone who ever sipped their lemonade along the trail, or unrolled a sleeping bag on the heli-pad behind the house.