Tag Archive: Grand Canyon

How Big Was That Elk?

4 Sep 2006 / PE

One morning at the Grand Canyon, my son and I were walking to the Canyon Cafe for breakfast when we saw a big elk near Yavapai Lodge.

“How big was it?” my wife asked later, when the boy was telling her the story.

“Big enough to CHOMP MY HEAD OFF!” he said. “If he wasn’t an herbivore.”


The Grandeur of the American Southwest

4 Sep 2006 / PE

We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . .

Grand Canyon - Bright Angel Trail - 3-Mile Resthouse

Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it?

For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau:

“I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.”

“Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain.

“I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said.

“You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –”

“HEY, LOOK!” my son yells. “IT’S A BUSH!

“– of the American Southwest.”


A Perfect Murder

16 Oct 2003 / Hostile Witness
Man hanging on branch

DURHAM, N.C. — A jury convicted novelist Michael Peterson Friday of bludgeoning his wife of five years in the stairwell of their Durham mansion.

Peterson says his wife fell down the stairs. Coincidentally, another female friend of Peterson’s was found dead at the bottom of a staicase in 1985 . . .

Continue reading A Perfect Murder