Rolling on the River in the Grand Canyon

Raging rapids, drenching waterfalls, bucket toilets and the odd snake – Laura Millar leaves her comfort zone for a wet and wild rafting trip through the Grand Canyon.

- Laura Millar

Feelings of insignificance come in various ways. There’s the sort you get by, say, attending an ex-boyfriend’s wedding – and then there’s standing in a narrow, stony gully at the very bottom of the Grand Canyon, some 6,000ft (just over a mile) down, being given a brief lesson in just how long some of that immutable rock has been there...

I discover that this famous chunk of Arizona is nearly two billion years old, but trying to take this in makes my head spin. Johnny, one of the affable crew members of the two river rafts which are bearing me and 27 other passengers down the Colorado River in between these towering walls, and a geologist by trade, tries to put it in perspective. ‘If we imagine earth formed, say, 10,000 years ago, and dinosaurs

appeared in the last four years, then mankind has only been around for, like, 60 seconds,’ he explains. Thanks for making us feel special, Johnny...

As it turns out, it does the soul a fair bit of good to feel insignificant and properly humble for a few days, down in one of the most jaw-dropping bits of nature Mother Earth ever created. Over five million visitors a year flock to this phenomenal scar on the planet’s surface – which is visible from outer space – and they mostly gather along the viewing points of its South Rim.

Formed by a combination of water erosion, tectonic plate shifting and volcanic activity, this canyon is certainly Grand: 277 miles long, it measures 18 miles across at its widest point and looms nearly 9,000ft at its highest. It makes The Wall in Game Of Thrones look like a rank amateur. It is, basically, mind-bendingly huge. And while the majority of people only see it from the top, every year some 30,000 adventurous travellers get the opposite perspective. And now I’m one of them.