Havasu Falls is a thirty-metre curtain of blue-green water dropping over red rock in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, on Havasupai land in Arizona. The colour is chemistry. Havasu Creek carries so much dissolved limestone that the water scatters light toward blue-green, and wherever it slows the mineral settles out as travertine, building the pale dams that hold its pools. There is no road to any of it. The way in is a sixteen-kilometre descent from Hualapai Hilltop, switchbacking off the rim and then following the creekbed between red walls and desert cottonwoods. You pass the village of Supai on the way down, thirteen kilometres in, where about two hundred people live. The air cools and greens as the water draws near. Every visit is overnight and on a permit. The pool at its foot is the reward: cool but swimmable through the warm months, with travertine ledges to sit on while mist drifts off the curtain onto you.
The campground threads along the creek below, and after dark the walls squeeze the sky above you to a bright ribbon of stars. Downstream, Mooney is the tallest fall in the canyon at around 58 metres, and getting to its base means a near-vertical wall of chains, iron pegs and wooden ladders, the rungs slick with spray under your hands the whole way down. The Havasupai have lived in this canyon for centuries, but in the 1880s the government confined them to barely two square kilometres around Supai. In 1975 a long campaign won about 750 square kilometres back, one of the largest returns of ancestral land to a Native American nation in the country's history. Five kilometres below Mooney the water quietens. At Beaver Falls the creek spills through a staircase of travertine, pooling behind each dam into shallow blue basins. You wade between them, sit down in the current, and watch it pour step by step toward the next terrace.