The Grand Canyon of the Colorado

Cougar/Mountain Lion
Thanks to: http://dhreno.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/mtnlion.jpg
I’m heading for the Grand Canyon three weeks from today with a couple other old farts. We’ll be in the abyss for five nights, then up to the North Rim for a couple of days. I’ve been to the canyon before, but never hiked it. Of course this is the hottest time of year to be there, so I’m taking as little as possible weight wise, but am still potentially overloaded. It’s the small things that count: glasses, binoculars, ear plugs, towel, gloves, utensils, toilet paper, thermometer, camera, tripod, space blanket, headlamp, matches, safety pins, clothes pins, mirror, moleskin, foot powder, etc. I’ve been reading a lot about the canyon. The history is pretty interesting, but the feeling I get is that when all’s said and done the canyon’s the canyon and what anyone says about it doesn't matter a hoot. It's only when you're in it that you're in it.

In the early part of the last century there was a guy named James T. Owens who was appointed game warden of the North Rim by rough and ready Teddy Roosevelt. Uncle Jimmy, as he was fondly called, was known for his skill in killing mountain lions and other predators—wolves, coyotes, etc. The big guns were trying to set up a hunting preserve out there, and the feeling was that the fewer predators you had, the more game would be available for hunting. Jimmy claimed that he and his dogs killed 532 cougars. That's right--532, although some believe he killed more than a thousand. Their skins covered his walls; he drove their claws into trees and into the siding of his house to show them off. He was much admired. Trouble was that once the cats and wolves were gone, the deer bred like rabbits. They ate everything green on the North Rim, and the population soared from 4000 to 100,000. Eventually they starved to death in droves, an ecological disaster and an early lesson in "wildlife management."

The thing I find interesting about all this is that a man actually had the will and desire to destroy 532 wild souls like that. Not for food, not for protection--just to kill them. These individuals were there long before Jimmy, minding their own business. It seems to me that violence like this against innocents leaves a man at the bottom of the barrel in the karma department. How do you look yourself in the mirror when you kill like that? But Uncle Jimmy Owens lived to be an old man, happy and venerated, making me wonder whether karma's a ruse. As someone wrote to me last week: "you can do whatever the hell you please, just so long as you can deal with the consequences." My guess is that Jimmy felt fine about it all, and life--his, anyway--was fine and good.