The canyon and the condor

Abstract

My family and I were tired as we loaded our heavy gear onto the “Hatch River Expeditions” motorized raft. We’d been up late repacking our luggage into waterproof bags of various sizes, since we were going to spend the next week on a commercial rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. My parents, my brother Loren and I had traveled to the Southwest before, and I decided at a young age that it was my favorite part of the country. I liked to imagine the dusty plains scattered with lonely, wandering cowboys instead of concrete highways. I was slightly less excited for this particular trip than others we’d taken, since I would have rather gone horseback riding and I was nervous about falling off the raft.