Francis Line Filmmaker

XVNorth Rim Magic1945 Storing our car in southern Utah, we commuted home by bus several times to get more camera supplies and develop our film. “You people deserve more gasoline,” the chairman of our gas rationing board told me on one of these commuter trips back to California. It was now mid 1945. “We’ve been […]

XIVCoasting Canyonward1944-’45 We probably should not have been surprised at the strange circumstances which occurred when we were camped on Grand Canyon’s North Rim, one of the most remote spots in America. Unusual circumstances had played a large role in the methods by which we were able to reach that spot. One of the finest […]

XIIIGrand Canyon Is In Our Bloodby Helen My first meeting with Francis resulted from a chain of coincidences. Had he and his brother not been persuaded — on their hiking odyssey around the United States — to take the side trip up California’s Redwood Highway, we never would have met. (See Chapter 3) If they […]

XIIRescue Below The Rimby Helen 1931Most visitors to Grand Canyon view it as a spectacle, a tourist experience, even perhaps a “show of shows.” I looked at its sweeping depths with a pair of eyes, and felt its mysterious spell with a sense of emotions that most others might never bring to the scene. I […]

XIGrand Canyon Initiationby Helen 1931s Arizona is not a place between carefully drawn boundaries on a neatly colored map. Arizona, for the people who live there, is an experience — an ever-growing sensation of expanding horizons stretching between haphazardly strewn mountains, bottomless canyons, and color-crazy forests and deserts which swallow up space, and seem to […]

XA Run to the River 1925 My brother and I were probably born with itchy feet. The love for travel which we possessed no doubt came as a natural inheritance from our father. He had traveled by bicycle (New York to Chicago and return, among many other such trips), by foot (twice climbing Pikes Peak), […]

IXThe Music of Tonto Plateaus Our day’s hike, so we planned, would take us on the Tonto Trail westward over the Tonto Platform to Hermit Camp. The map showed this as a gentle, waving line. What the map did not show is what really mattered. The gentle waving line became a tantalizing path into a […]

VIIICatcalls at Phantom Ranch The Grand Canyon changes with each hour, and with every visit. This is in part because each floating shadow, each storm, each different angle of the sun or moon, as day and night play hide-and-seek with its temples and gorges, creates new shapes and colors and patterns. The Canyon aspect changes, […]

VII    Our Final Goal Grand Canyon Sunday, April 1, 1923. This was Easter Sunday. This was April Fools’ Day. This was the day we would see Grand Canyon. We had joined the road in from Williams. A sign told us the Canyon was just seven miles ahead. By 9:30 a.m. we reached the park ranger […]

VColor It Gold March 23, 1923. California had been good to us, beyond all expectations, but our final goal was still beckoning. Arizona and its Grand Canyon lay ahead. From San Bernardino we started walking eastward. A pitted asphalt strip, just wide enough for a single car, was our pathway across the Mojave Desert to […]