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老罗斯福总统的大峡谷游记

热度 12已有 1359 次阅读2018-6-28 12:34 |个人分类:读书笔记

2018-6-27

说到美国的科罗拉多大峡谷国家公园，就不能不提老罗斯福总统。一般人都会记起1903年老罗斯福在大峡谷南缘说的一番话：“大峡谷使我充满了敬畏，它无可比拟，无法形容，在这辽阔的世界上，绝无仅有。”和在1908年，建立了大峡谷国家纪念碑。

The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison — beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world ... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sights which every American should see.

President Theodore Roosevelt liberally interpreted the Antiquities Act of 1906 in creating the 1,279-square-mile Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. The monument was carved from Grand Canyon National Forest, initially designated by President Benjamin Harrison as a preserve in 1893. The U.S. Forest Service managed the monument from 1908 until it became a national park, relying on the Santa Fe Railroad to invest in roads, trails and facilities to serve a budding tourism industry.

In his essay, A Cougar Hunt on the Rim of the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt rants against "wanton destruction" of the "public domain" and calls for the preservation of wildlife and land for the use of future generations. That philosophy launched federal conservation efforts that led to the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916 (three years later, the Grand Canyon became a national park).

手边正好有一本书，是1916年出版的《老罗斯福选集第十七卷：爱书人的野外游记》（A Book-lover's Holidays in the Open）。该书的第一章，就是《在大峡谷北缘猎美洲狮》（A Cougar Hunt on the Rim of the Grand Canyon），讲的就是在1913年7月老罗斯福总统带领他的两个儿子和一个侄子横穿科罗拉多河从大峡谷南缘到大峡谷北缘打猎的故事。

On July 14, 1913, our party gathered at the comfortable El Tovar Hotel, on the edge of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and therefore overlooking the most wonderful scenery in the world. The moon was full. Dim, vast, mysterious, the canyon lay in the shimmering radiance. To all else that is strange and beautiful in nature the Canyon stands as Karnak and Baalbec, seen by moonlight, stand to all other ruined temples and palaces of the bygone ages.

With me were my two younger sons, Archie and Quentin, aged nineteen and fifteen respectively, and a cousin of theirs, Nicholas, aged twenty. The cousin had driven our horses, and what outfit we did not ourselves carry, from southern Arizona to the north side of the canyon, and had then crossed the canyon to meet us. The youngest one of the three had not before been on such a trip as that we intended to take; but the two elder boys, for their good fortune, had formerly been at the Evans School in Mesa, Arizona, and among the by-products of their education was a practical and working familiarity with ranch life, with the round-up, and with travelling through the desert and on the mountains.

老罗斯福总统的这篇游记，记载了在大约105年之前，从科罗拉多大峡谷谷底徒步爬上大峡谷的北缘，大致需要八个小时的时间。随著技术的进步，现在人们从大峡谷的南缘到北缘，开车大概只需要六个小时的时间。可是要徒步攀缘，从谷底到北缘，仍然需要大致八个小时或者更多的时间。

On the 15th we went down to the bottom of the canyon。。。 It is a hard climb out of the canyon on the north side, and Mansfield was bound that we should have an early start. He was up at half-past one in the morning; we breakfasted on a few spoonfuls of mush; packed the mules and saddled the horses; and then in the sultry darkness, which in spite of the moon filled the bottom of the stupendous gorge, we started up the Bright Angel trail. Cummings and the two elder boys walked; the rest of us were on horseback. The trail crossed and recrossed the rapid brook, and for rods at a time went up its bowlder-filled bed; groping and stumbling, we made our blind way along it; and over an hour passed before the first grayness of the dawn faintly lighted our footsteps.

At last we left the stream bed, and the trail climbed the sheer slopes and zigzagged upward through the breaks in the cliff walls. At one place the Bar Z men showed us where one of their pack-animals had lost his footing and fallen down the mountainside a year previously. It was eight hours before we topped the rim and came out on the high, wooded, broken plateau which at this part of its course forms the northern barrier of the deep-sunk Colorado River.