While spending lots of solitary time at Manzanita Ranger Station this summer, Park Ranger Ceili Brennan reflects on reminders that we are never the first to love a place.

CEILI (HOST AND NARRATOR): What do you see when you picture the Grand Canyon? Is it massive? Full of light and shadows and colors? Can you tell how deep it is? Can you make out the details of anything familiar? Does it look like wilderness? What’s even down there? Let’s find out. Hi, I’m a Park Ranger, Ceili, and you’re listening to an episode of Behind the Scenery: Canyon Cuts. In this episode, we’re going to zoom way in to a specific spot in Grand Canyon, where two side canyons, Bright Angel and Manzanita, meet. But first, travel into your memory with me for a moment. You’re a kid in the summer. School just got out, its hot. You take every possible opportunity to get in the water. Where are you in this memory? Who are you with? What are you wearing? What are you eating? Keep these memories in mind as we explore one of my favorite places in the Grand Canyon.

This summer, I’ve spent a lot of time at Manzanita Rest Area, or Manzanita Ranger Station although it goes by other names too. To get there, you start on the North Rim of Grand Canyon, on the North Kaibab Trail. At the trailhead, it’s relatively cool, shaded by ponderosa pines and spruces at 8000 ft above sea level. Just 5.5 miles and 3840 feet of downhill hiking will bring you to Manzanita. The ranger station is a brown house right next to the confluence of Manzanita and Bright Angel Creeks. In the summer its very hot, and is amidst cacti and lizards. But because of the creeks, has some big Cottonwood, Box Elder and even Fig trees nearby. There are several backcountry ranger stations in Grand Canyon, each with their own character. Manzanita doesn’t have the views or day-hiker activity of Indian Garden, or the river and canteen culture like Phantom Ranch does. It’s the only one on the corridor trails without a campground right outside. It’s the furthest away from the bustling city that is the South Rim, but closest to what feels like my Grand Canyon home, the North Rim.

My other home is my family’s porch near the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve grown up dripping saltwater, drinking coffee on cool spring mornings, and hanging out late into summer nights on that porch. Summers were spent with my brother, cousins, and neighborhood kids, in bathing suits all day, in the water or on the porch.

When I first visited Manzanita Ranger Station, the porch is what caught my eye. Leafy vines creeping up the pillars help keep it shady almost all day. The creek and cicadas are the soundtrack to time on this porch, in the rocking chair, sipping an electrolyte drink after a long hike. Some porches have a sweeping view, but this one looks straight into a cliff. Luckily, they’re cliffs of maroon and golden Bright Angel Shale, swirly Tapeats sandstone and the majestic redwall limestone. From many viewpoints on the rim, these rock layers are too deep to see.

Around sunset when it starts to get cooler, I gravitate towards the helipad. While its main function is keeping a safe space for helicopters to land, it also serves as an extension of the porch. There may be no better place in the Canyon to eat dinner, lay down, and watch the stars appear.

When I’m at Manzanita, the photo album on the bookshelf inside is never far from my mind. It’s filled with photos of this same porch, the same creek and trees and rocks, but they’re transformed by time.

This wasn’t always Manzanita Ranger Station. It used to be and is still often referred to as Bruce’s house, and was the home of the Aiken Family. Bruce Aiken kept the pumps running at the nearby Roaring Springs, which pumps drinking water to both the North and South. When he took the job and moved here with his wife, Mary, and baby daughter in 1972, they never thought they’d stay for 30 years. As he ran the pumps and captured the scenery around him through his art, the 3 kids grew up, climbing cliffs, doing schoolwork, building forts, selling lemonade and swimming in the creek.

In the album, there are photos of babies crawling in a patch of grass amidst the canyon’s rocks, toddlers in sneakers and bathing suits on the NKT, kids fishing knee deep in the creek, a pool party after a rock fall dammed part of the creek into a lake, adults laying in hammocks and sitting in the same chairs that I’m sitting in now, chatting and laughing. Piles of colorful rock collections around the porch. Bruce getting ready to hike human-sized canvases in and out of the Canyon. Trail-side lemonade stands.

The album is labeled in ballpoint pen, “This is what went on here at Roaring Springs over past several decades ~1972-2005 Enjoy, Bruce”.

It seems I’m even more mesmerized by the cliffs, rocks, smells and sky around Manzanita, because I can’t help but see it all through the eyes of these kids. Everything is amazing through the eyes of imagined kids, exploring this place, their backyard. As Mary said of her kids’ schooling here, “The classroom is endless.” This is true of Grand Canyon, and of outdoor spaces around anyone’s home. While the bottom of Grand Canyon could not be more different than where I grew up, the photos in this album look familiar to me. I also spent summers in sneakers and bathing suits, in and out of the water all day, my brother, cousins, and any other kids that were around also explored every inch of our backyard and sold lemonade to passersby.

The story told in these photos is a popular one. There are countless photocopies of magazines and book pages that tell parts of the story of the Aiken’s time living in the Grand Canyon. My favorite photocopy is from a book, telling some of this story from Mary’s perspective. She says, “’I’d be out on the heliport and I’d hear these distant voices. I would look up and they would be way up on a ledge at the base of the Redwall cliffs. I’d see these tiny figures, these dots of color. I couldn’t even look at them; I’d have to come into the house. But I couldn’t say anything to them. They were just like little mountain goats. I didn’t want to make them afraid they were going to fall. That was hard for me.’”

I can imagine what it might feel like to be a kid growing up here. As I watch the sunset from the helipad and look up at the cliffs, high and steep around me, I can also imagine what it might feel like to be a parent here.

Recently I spent a whole week at Manzanita Ranger Station. It’s the middle of summer, usually a very busy time in the Canyon. But between Covid and fires on the North Rim, I only saw 5 hikers in all those days. So instead of talking to hikers, I’ve been imagining the lives captured in this photo album, searching for signs of their days here. One late afternoon, I was hiking along one of the same trails I’ve hiked on many times. I was focused on the terrain, how the steepness, the side drainages, and the flood zone left little area to safely live, to build a home. I came to a spot that was flat and away from danger of flooding and stopped to look around. All of a sudden, walls came into focus, more and more of them. Angular rocks stacked up on top of each other sometime in the last thousand years, and flat floors. I knew there to be archeological sites all over Grand Canyon, but had never seen these, despite passing by so many times. I imagined photo albums from these homes. I wondered how the photos would be different than the Aikens’ album, and how they’d be similar. They would probably still include kids in the water during hot summers, and parents squinting up into the cliffs for them. I started to see other parts of Grand Canyon, not only through the eyes of the 3 kids in the 80s who grew up at Roaring Springs, but through the eyes of all the kids since time immemorial who grew up here, played here, and through the eyes of all of their parents who worried about them and worked to raise them. Grand Canyon is proposed wilderness, and has been a National Park for 100 years. But to Grand Canyon National Park’s 11 traditionally associated tribes, and their ancestors, it has always been, and still is, a backyard, a home, and a sacred place. What can we learned from reminders that we are never the first to love a place? What are you leaving behind to express your love for your favorite place? This episode of Canyon Cuts was brought to you by the Interpretation Team at Grand Canyon National Park. We gratefully acknowledge the Native peoples on whose land we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their home here today. Music is High Ride by Blue Dot Sessions, and Springish by Gillicuddy. Tracks provided by Free Music Archives. Thanks for tuning in!