Hiking beside it was a thrill. Floating in it was a blast. After individually jumping in and bobbing through some rapids, we then made a human “chain”: your feet hook under the arms of the guy in front of you, and the guy’s feet behind you hook under your arms. All 28 of us then floated the rapids together like a long, segmented worm. It was unbelievable! I felt like a little kid and didn’t want to get out. When Tom said it was time to leave, I pleaded, “Aw, Daddy, do we have to go? Can’t we stay here for just a few more…days or weeks?”

For me, every bend in the river was like opening a Christmas present. Each new vista was worth the whole trip. Yesterday, we had lunch at the Redwall Cavern (sounds like a good name for a roadside restaurant). It was phenomenal. I wanted to stay there as well.

Before that, we had hiked up to see “fossil rock”, a huge boulder bejeweled with a myriad of fossils. It reminded me of a massive ball of chocolate-chip cookie dough and the fossils were the chocolate chips sticking out everywhere (okay, maybe the 100-degree-plus heat was getting to me). As I gazed at it, I couldn’t help but get the sense of the immense “turmoil” that buried and encased these marine creatures.

The canyon also held archeological remains of a human presence, believed to be ancient ancestors of the modern Pueblo People. We stopped to look at several of their cliff ruins and petroglyphs, and saw other evidence numerous times along the way, including their granaries, high up the shear rock of the canyon walls. They must have been an amazing people. As best we can tell, they flourished in the southwest about a thousand years ago. What eventually happened to them is a mystery.

At mile marker 77, all of the rock layers in the Grand Canyon, except for the lava flows that would appear later, had been exposed to us. We had stopped earlier, at mile 64, to get a close look at what is called the “Great Unconformity”. This is a very prominent line that separates the basement rocks from the horizontal sedimentary layers. For all practical purposes, fossils don’t exist below this line, but they do in abundance above it. The Great Unconformity extends all over the globe, but is clearly evident in the Canyon. In conventional geological literature, this sharp line represents a gap of anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years, where nothing was happening. It is a major “blank” in geological time.

However, there are sedimentary layers beneath the Great Unconformity. These are called the Grand Canyon Supergroup (CGS). They lie at a steep angle beneath the first horizontal sedimentary layer, the Tapeats Sandstone, which appears to have “sheared” the supergroup horizontally like a sharp knife cutting off a layered cake, tilted sideways. (You can see it here in one of our teaching charts…) The conjecture, from a biblical perspective, is that these sedimentary layers were probably laid down during creation. This fascinated me, and that night I pondered 2 Peter 3:5, where it says that God was “forming the earth with water”. Amazing. How could those two words (”with water”) not have registered with me before? If we understand the passage correctly, then is it possible that God was actually using the power of water to “form” the earth by quickly grinding the rock into smaller and smaller particles? And if so, and we were viewing the rocks correctly, could this then be the very evidence of the sedimentary layers that would have been naturally formed from such a work, sans fossils? If so, this was exactly what we were seeing.

Wow! So much to see..so much beauty and so much evidence to ponder.

I love this trip!

I liked this notion of time. I enjoy getting up early, and when I awoke this morning, the night sky was just turning from black to navy blue. I love seeing the sun’s first rays illuminate the world.

Late yesterday, (which is four o’clock, river time) we had pulled the boats up to a sand bar and set up camp, consisting of the kitchen, the bathroom, the meeting “circle” (folding canvas chairs) and our bedrooms—a personally selected plot of sand. Each of us had been allotted two waterproof bags for our personal items: a large “duffel bag” (stowed away during the day) and a much smaller one for cameras and rain gear, which we carried with us on the raft. In addition, we each had an aluminum frame cot, a sleeping bag (which I only used for padding), a sheet, and an inflatable “pillow” (in quotes because the word “pillow” is relative).

Now, somehow, maybe just below a miracle, all of this stuff, including a week of food and drinks for 32 people, was packed into our rafts. Getting it all on and off each day was a task, made easier by our “duffle shuffle”—a “gauntlet” by which we “surfed” everything out of the boat in the evening or into the boat in the morning. Each of our “duffel” bags had a prominent number (mine was C14), so there came a daily chorus of groans when overloaded duffel bags strained the gauntlet. Their numbers became infamous. Only on the last night did some confess to be the owners of the particularly back-breaking bags.

So, we had survived the first day and the first night. Waking up to the silence of the canyon and its early morning beauty put a smile on my face. I was ready for the day.

Tuesday brought us more fossil evidence. Deep in the Redwall Limestone formation is a 2-meter layer that contains billions of fossilized nautiloids along with brachiopods, bryozoans, crinoids and gastropods. This graveyard extends over 5,000 square miles, from northern Arizona to southern Nevada. But the nautiloid fossils were telling us about more than just their rapid burial. Many are oriented in a west or southwest direction and many are buried on end as if they were overcome by a tumultuous deluge of water and sediment. This was another piece of evidence that seemed to contradict what I had been taught, that marine fossils were buried slowly and in a placid ocean. On Monday, we had even seen fossilized animal tracks in the Coconino Limestone that indicated the animal was being swept “downstream” as the orientation of the paws were not in line with the succeeding paw prints. These seemed to tell a story that, in between the moments when the paws dug into the sediment, the animal had been swept sideways. All of this actually fit together. If the creatures were being buried quickly with tons of sedimentary material, then one would expect that the water, if it were transporting so much material, had to be moving quite rapidly.

We saw further evidence of this when we stopped to look at “cross-beds” formed by high velocity water currents. These “sand waves” are similar to how sand dunes are formed today by the flow of high winds. By studying these “cross-beds”, it is possible to estimate the strength of the water flow as it carried massive amounts of sediment over a vast area. In the Coconino Sandstone, this extensive cross-bedding stretches across Arizona and New Mexico and equivalently into Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas.

The picture that was beginning to form in our minds was one of enormous amounts of water and material, tearing across North America, rapidly burying whatever was caught in the sediment as it was deposited on the bottom. It must have been massive, colossal, tumultuous.

As we examined the growing evidence that we were floating through the remains of a very large flood, I was continually overwhelmed by the notion that in the midst of this catastrophe, the resultant beauty was stunning.

Grace shining through destruction.

The road from the Marble Canyon Lodge dropped us 467 feet, the height of Navajo Bridge, down to Lee’s Ferry and water-level. It was here that we met our WWII-vintage rubber rafts and the 46-degree Colorado River, both of which were going to take us from mile zero, as marked on our water-proof river guide maps, to mile 187. We also assumed that these baby-blue boats would get us safely through the 150 white-water rapids that waited for us between here and the end of our trip, where a helicopter would drop deep into the canyon and take us back to the “rim world”.

All of that seemed a long way off as we awkwardly waded into the water and tried various gymnastic techniques to climb aboard these huge “tubes” for the first time. It would soon become second nature, however, as we would embark and disembark numerous times during the day for side trips up the canyon wall or into tributary ravines and gulches to view rock formations, fossils, and unspeakable beauty.

After a near comical chore of successfully getting everyone in the boat and making sure our life vests were on with their four “snaps” secure, we finally launched…only to travel across the river and after “a little bump, men”, tied up on the opposite bank and stumbled off for a little classroom trek up the steep “talus” sides of the canyon. This was fitting, for it set the tone for the purpose of our trip and the many hikes and “lectures” concerning what we were seeing. We weren’t here merely for the awesome beauty or the thrill of the rapids, we were here to learn about what the “Canyon” had to teach us.

This first hike took us up to a large fossilized tree, perfectly preserved in one of the many, many sedimentary layers that are fully exposed at various places throughout the length of the Grand Canyon. It took me several days to begin to realize what a unique opportunity this canyon provides, revealing a full view of geological time, virtually all of it, right before our very eyes.

As we stood by this ancient tree, Dr. Andrew Snelling gave us a lecture on the requisite conditions under which things get “fossilized”. This was important because all of the layers above the “great unconformity” (I’ll talk about that later) contain millions and millions of fossils. Creatures and plant-life both buried and preserved in the rocks. How does this happen? Typically, when living things die, they quickly decompose…if they are not eaten first.

So, how does something become fossilized?

Well, the story I was told in school was that a fossil was created when something died and sediment would slowly cover it up over a long period of time. I believed that, but it never really made any sense to me. Growing up on a farm, I had seen things die. But it didn’t take long for them to soon smell bad and if they weren’t eaten or dragged off somewhere, they rotted. So, long periods of time spent waiting to get “covered up” by slow deposits of sediment, raised sticky questions of decay or the food chain issue in my mind. And, evidently, those same issues are causing some geologists now to move more to the notion that fossils are created as the result of some catastrophic event…like a flood, which rapidly buries “living” things under a load of sediment. Over time and pressure, that sediment turns to rock and the plant or creature’s parts are mineralized…and presto…we have a fossil. That certainly made more sense as we were standing before this huge tree that appeared to be fossilized without much hint of decay or rotting.

This thought would linger in our minds for the rest of the trip as we examined numerous fossils and were constantly viewing the exposed sedimentary layers of the canyon walls. If each layer, filled with millions of fossils, were laid down quickly, then the possibility existed that the canyon was not nearly as old as conventional geology had taught. Though current geologists are beginning to recognize and acknowledge the necessity for rapid burial, they still maintain that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old. But if the ancient writings of Moses are correct, and a massive, global flood did occur some time in the past, then we would expect to see vast numbers of plants and living creatures rapidly buried in immense layers of sedimentary rock—strata in which we would find their fossilized remains.

Is that what we would find here?

I was excited to see what the rest of the day would hold and the opportunity to discuss these issues further as we floated in this historical museum of intense and awesome beauty.

This is the kind of stuff that electrifies me.

An all-day bus trip had taken us from our gathering place in Las Vegas, through the northeast corner of Arizona, into southern Utah, and then back down into Arizona, winding our way eventually to the Navajo Bridge and the Marble Canyon Lodge, where we would spend our last night in a real bed. For the map aficionados, we drove I-15 to Utah 9, then 59 to Arizona 389, then 89A.

This place is what one might call “isolated”. Yet it was beautiful. Two new friends and I walked across the Navajo Bridge and got our first look at the Colorado River, 467 feet below, which would become our home for the next week.

I awoke with the first hint of sunrise and took my final morning run. The rock formations were amazing, but the silence was stunning. I know it sounds stupid to say this, but I had to stop and “listen” to it. Something was different about this silence. I think my body even sensed the lack of radio and television waves. Cell phone coverage was non-existent too, so there were no cell tower signals either. No power lines. No telephone wires. No “emanations” from anything. It was total and complete silence. I stood there, dead still, for a long time, just to experience what is a complete rarity in our world today.

As I sit here now, I long to take that run again.

After breakfast and another pre-trip briefing, the 23 “scholars” and the five “teachers” gathered together for a group photo.

As Tom put it, the objective was 28 in and 28 out.

We began as strangers, but ended up friends and fellow pilgrims on this most important quest. I was anxious to get started.

It wasn’t easy cramming us all into the three vans, but we somehow got the doors closed and headed for Lee’s Ferry, where we would meet the river, the “canyon” and our rafts…and begin our week-long study of the evidence that the “canyon” held for us.

Can eight remote days in the Grand Canyon really do this to you?

Tom had warned us that our transition back to the civilized world might be a struggle. I admit that my bed did feel good last night, but I also felt a little claustrophobic looking up at the ceiling and sensed an emptiness and a hunger for the vastness of a star-filled sky that had been the canopy above my bedroll over the previous week.

I returned late last night from one of the most amazing adventures of my life—an 8-day archeological and geological rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. Led by Tom Vail who heads up Canyon Ministries, we launched two baby-blue, WWII vintage rubber rafts into the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry and began our 187-mile adventure, camping on sand dunes each night along the way.

The magnificence of the river was sufficient in itself to make this trip a lifetime memory. It was at times overwhelmingly powerful, with white water rapids that bucked you like a bronco and at other times, it seemed almost asleep. It snaked like a huge python, sometimes south, sometimes north or west, but hardly ever in a straight line. There were times when it slowed to a crawl, deepened in color, and you sensed that it was simply hiding its fury in the enormous depths of a narrow passage, and times when the surface boiled with up-currents and whirlpools and eddies that would silently reach up and twist and yank at the boat. But any silence soon gave way to a deep-throated rumble that warned of another drop ahead and the approach of “white water”—sometimes with a whole lot of “white”. The larger rapids contained deep holes and hungry valleys that seemed eager to swallow the entire boat and yet, failing that, would attempt at least to sweep everything away with the drenching weight of its chest-pounding waves.

It is simply awesome.

But to a great extent, the river was just the magic carpet that carried us to and through a phenomenal wonderland: canyon walls of head-shaking beauty—each bend in the river bringing a new, more breath-taking view; emerald-green water surrounding enclaves of white sand; blue herons standing like statues on the shore; deer and big-horn sheep gazing at us as if we were the spectacle, not them; hikes up side-canyons that led to turquoise streams, waterfalls, bubbling pools and a myriad of awesome beauty; fascinating geological and archeological features—sedimentary layers and fossilized remains that I and 22 “scholars” had come to study–features that held the secrets of their origin; and…well, so much more.

I would like to chronicle some of this with you, and the evidence I saw, knowing that my words and pictures will fall woefully short in any attempt to convey the beauty and impact this trip has had upon me.

Tom was right when he declared we would never be the same. He was also right in saying that coming back to the “rim world” would be difficult. As I looked in the mirror this morning, with my feet crammed into dress shoes and a tie that was nearly choking me, I decided to brave the ridicule and leave the eight-day growth on my face—it was my way of keeping some of the experience alive. I have never, in my entire life, gone to work unshaven.

I did today.

Yep…something happened to me in the Canyon.

We use that foundation to better understand His design for the family, the church, the state, labor, community, and the personal relationship, unio mystica, that He grants to His children. Following each class (as often as possible) the students get a tray of food and come back to the classroom for an hour to “potpourri”–an open forum where we engage in an open dialogue about anything that is on their mind–from class or life. The rest of the afternoon is filled with one-on-one meetings in my office, where we deal with personal questions and sometimes some very personal struggles and heartbreaking issues. It isn’t hard to fall in love with them.

Tuesday nights we have dinner at the park and end with a wonderful time of worship, led by the students.

But my portion is now over and I will deeply sense the void of not having a full day with them throughout the rest of the semester. They will graduate before any of us want them to and then they will venture back into the world they came from. Our prayer is that the Lord has done a deep transformational work in them while they are here and that they will be found, years from now, fulfilling God’s call in their life, wherever that may be and in whatever vocation God has gifted them to engage in…light and salt…attractively winsome…turning the world upside down.

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Now playing: Truth Project June 19 CCN recording
via FoxyTunes

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Now playing: Truth Project June 19 CCN recording
via FoxyTunes (more…)

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