As I prepared to go, and talked to friends about the coming trip, I was amazed how many people knew the inner canyon well. One acquaintance told me that he had spent 300 nights below the rim, falling just short of a lifetime’s ambition of a full year. In a grocery store in Santa Fe, where I live, I got talking with a Grand Canyon-crazy runner who hikes from rim to rim in a single day several times a year. A woman in a coffee shop line told me about the time a 10-pound falling rock nearly knocked her off a trail. I began to get the feeling the Grand Canyon is truly a national monument, analogous to the Lake District in England in its centrality to the nation’s psyche. “Each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon,” Carl Sandburg said. It’s something all Americans share, and can take pride in.

This was all very well, but the canyon is one mile deep, and the trail itself about 10 miles long, and that translates to a very arduous walk, especially for an 8-year-old. By some arcane family algebra, it was Saul, our younger son, who was due a trip with me.