The North Rim's Long Winter

South of Jacob Lake, Route 67 runs across the Kaibab Plateau and stops at a steel bar. The bar is a gate on a pivot, locked with a padlock the size of a fist. On the far side the asphalt continues, straight and empty, into the trees. In the fall the bar comes down, and then the snow does the rest. By January the gate is buried to its hinge. The road persists the way a riverbed persists when the water is gone — a cleared line through the forest, waiting.

Jacob Lake is not much of a town. It is a crossroads and a ranger station, a place of gas pumps and big sky, named for a pond hidden somewhere in the trees. In summer it is the last stop before the rim. In winter it is the end of the line. The gate lies to the south, beyond the ranger station, and past it there is nothing to do but turn around or go on skis.

The gate closes off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon — the high forest that runs to the edge of the gorge, the viewpoints and the stone lodge and the trails turning down toward the river. For half the year, the canyon's northern edge is simply not available. The public gets the South Rim, which stays open year-round, plowed and lit and busy. The North Rim gets the winter.

It is easy to forget, standing at the South Rim in January, that the other rim is only a few miles away across the gorge and yet wholly out of reach. The traveler who wants the North Rim in winter must want it badly. Between the gate and the overlooks lies a high forest of ponderosa pine and aspen where the snow falls deeper than anywhere else in Arizona. The storms build over the plateau, unload, and move on, and the next storm does it again. By midwinter the drifts are taller than a person, and the sense of distance from the rest of the country is total.

The Rim the Crowds Miss

The South Rim has the railroad and the parking decks and the handrails worn smooth by a million palms. The North Rim has never had that appetite. In summer it is the quieter rim, and the higher one — nearly a thousand feet above its famous neighbor — and the difference is in the air. It is thinner, cooler, and the storms come harder. The approach is not desert but mountain forest: ponderosa pine in the open, spruce in the draws, aspen turning gold in September and throwing off leaves that drift across the road like coins.

At Point Imperial, the highest point on the rim, the ground falls away in a long pale sweep of broken stone and the eye goes out across the whole width of the canyon. The river is a mile below, out of sight, still working its way through rock it has been cutting for millions of years. On a clear day the view reaches past the canyon to the red country of the east, and the scale is so large that the mind refuses it for a moment. Visitors stand at the railing and go quiet. There is nothing to add.

Back from the edge stands the lodge, built of stone and timber in the old national park manner, with a long room of windows that faces the abyss. In season the room is full of people playing cards and reading and pretending not to stare. In winter the lodge is dark inside, the furniture covered, the water drained. The windows go on looking anyway.

Beyond the lodge the rim runs on for miles — cliffs, coves, promontories, a country of stone and wind. In June the meadows along the road fill with wildflowers and the mule deer stand in the grass. The whole place has the feeling of a high island, set apart from the desert below by a thousand feet of air and a wall of forest. It is the Grand Canyon's other half, and most visitors never see it.

The Months of Snow

The months of closure are the landscape doing what it does. Roughly half the year the rim is shut — the road unplowed, the lodge empty, the water off. Winter turns the canyon upside down. The cold settles on the rim, while far below, where the river runs, the air keeps its warmth, and the canyon's own weather rises out of the depths to meet the snow.

What lives there in winter is what lived there before the road was a road. Mule deer move down from the high meadows and yard up in the timber, trampling the snow into packed lanes. Elk work through the browse. The Kaibab squirrel — gray, white-tailed, found nowhere else on earth — crosses the surface of the drifts to raid pinecones. Ravens work the updrafts along the edge, and their calls carry a long way in air that is clear and cold. For a time the only tracks on the highway are animal tracks.

Then the skiers come. A few every winter, because the rim draws them, and they come on skis or snowshoes or not at all, following the unplowed road through a forest that has gone quiet. It is a long trip and a cold one, and the reward is a rim without railings and crowds — only the canyon opening out below into a depth of blue air. On many days the canyon is full of its own weather: a sea of white fog that pours in during the night and sits there until the sun burns it off, with only the great buttes — Vishnu Temple, Wotan's Throne — standing above the surface like islands. To stand on the North Rim then is to stand at the edge of a white sea, in one of the great silences of the country.

The Return of the Plows

The snow takes its time leaving. The last drifts sit in the shaded draws well into spring, and the plows do not rush. Then one day the road is clear to the gate. The gate swings open. The first vehicles of the year roll south through the pines, and the North Rim comes back to the world like a place surfacing from under water.

The reopening is as much an event as the closing. Staff return to the lodge and sweep out the dust and the dead flies and the silence. The water is turned back on. The windows of the long room are opened to the same view they have always had. The first visitors of the season step out at Point Imperial and stand where the ground ends, looking down a mile, and the old conversation starts again: light, scale, the river working below.

But everyone who works up here knows the arithmetic. The rim is a loan from the weather, and the weather always collects. The season runs from spring to fall, and then the aspens turn, the first hard snow crosses the plateau, the gate comes down, and the road returns to the drifts. The North Rim goes back to being a place beyond reach.

It is a keeping. The canyon has been at this for millions of years, and a few months of padlock and snow mean nothing to it. The river keeps cutting. The rim keeps standing. The gate is only a small human gesture of surrender to the force that has always had the final say here. The South Rim is a year-round promise. The North Rim is a place that asks to be wanted — and then waits, white and patient, for the thaw that always comes.

Photos: Dietmar Rabich, Lukikam (CC BY-SA 4.0); Kaibab National Forest (CC BY-SA 2.0)