The first thing many visitors notice at the Grand Canyon is not the scale. It is the silence that arrives just after the scale.
You can see it in a common scene: a bus pulls up, pe

The first thing everyone mentions is the temperature. Death Valley National Park holds the record for the highest reliably recorded air temperature on Earth—134°F (56.7°C) in 1913.

and sunlight.
Geologists continue to study the exact timing of the canyon’s formation, but the broad story is clear: sedimentary layers were deposited over vast stretches of time,