Canyon and Cosmos: Searching for Human Identity in the Grand Canyon

by Don Lago

Overview

Throughout history, humans have sought creation stories to define our identity and affirm our connections with the universe, diverse life forms, and one another. Over the last two centuries, science has delivered a bold new creation story full of immense time and space, extraordinary objects, and powerful natural forces. Science ideas can seem mere abstractions, but at the Grand Canyon, better than anywhere else on Earth, our new creation story is manifested physically and powerfully.
 
A major work of literary nature writing, Canyon and Cosmos takes readers on a journey through the Grand Canyon's deep time, geological forces, and biological evolution, making them very real, personal, and meaningful. Through decades of hiking and kayaking, author Don Lago has gotten to know the canyon intimately. Ranging through world mythologies and Native American spirituality, he explores how humans have sought to understand the universe. He confronts existential questions of whether humans can find enough meaning in the scientific cosmos. Through poetic prose, symbolism, and philosophical insight, he shows how existence itself is our deepest source of life and meaning.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647791964
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	362
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Don Lago is one of the most respected historians of the Grand Canyon and the author of Grand Canyon: A History of a Natural Wonder and a National Park, Where the Earth Touched the Sky: The Cosmological Landscapes of the Southwest, and The Powell Expedition: New Discoveries. His literary nature writing, often with an emphasis on astronomy, has been published in prominent magazines and literary reviews.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction Prologue: The Sipapu The River The Abyss The Raven Acknowledgments About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Don Lago writes beautifully about beautiful places. This book is a love letter to the Grand Canyon, but it’s also more than that: Lago complicates-in necessary, deeply factual and lyrical fashion-the various human relationships to one of the great wonders of the world. Looking beyond the easy vista, Lago sees a web connecting indigenous cultures to scientific cosmologies, self to stone, humans to the long history of the nonhuman, which Lago lays bare. Along the way, we learn about everything from the history of the kayak to the reminders of stromatolites, from the sad history of suicides at the canyon to the redemptive power of deep time. We’re even awed by a rabbit-who races under Lago’s truck to escape a pack of coyotes. This intensely personal and learned book shows us how time reverberates with story and stars, friable rock and flawed flesh.”
—Christopher Cokinos, author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moonfrom Antiquity to Tomorrow 
 
“No one thinks more deeply about the very deep Grand Canyon than scholar and explorer Don Lago. In this generous, often spiritual journey, his intimate connections to place become our own.”
—Rebecca Lawton, fluvial geologist, former Grand Canyon river guide, and author of The Oasis This Time: Living and Dying with Water in the West
 
“In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau and his collection of meditations compiled in Walden, Don Lago explores our human existence through experiences with one of nature’s most stunning masterpieces, the Grand Canyon. Lago links the very fabric of humanity to stories of the Canyon’s water below, heavens above, and rocks within, using the Canyon as a portal to understand our place in the universe. This is nature writing at its best!”
—Kevin Schindler, historian and author of Past and Present: Grand Canyon
 
 “Reading Lago’s book feels like journeying into the canyon itself, becoming lost within its myriad side canyons and savoring encounters with tiny flowering cacti and vistas of land, water, and sky. If the canyon could write its own autobiography, it would look like Canyon and Cosmos. This work is a special contribution to the tradition of Grand Canyon literature.”
—Scott Slovic, senior scientist, Oregon Research Institute, and coeditor of Nature and Literary Studies
 

From the Publisher