The poem "Silence of the Canyon" by William Wendell Riley aptly captures my memories:
Grand Canyon had no speech to make.
She never said a word.
While I viewed her matchless glory,
I was startled by a bird.
It came flying, tumbling through the air,
And stopped beside me there,
And sung the sweetest little song.
How I wanted you to hear.
A little chipmunk then rushed out
And stood on his hind legs
And chattered me a welcome
To this land of towering crags.
Then, another little songster,
From the tip top of a pine,
Sang as sweet as ever echoed
In the valley of the Rhine!
But the Gorge was mute, but glorious,
Magnificent, sublime!
Her secrets still remain her own
And will throughout all time!
In "The Lost Continent" Bill Bryson writes, "… Nothing prepares you for the Grand Canyon. No matter how many times you read about it or see it pictured, it still takes your breath away. Your mind, unable to deal with anything on this scale, just shuts down and for many long moments you are a human vacuum, without speech or breath, but just a deep, inexpressible awe that anything on this earth could be so vast, so beautiful, so silent. Even children are stilled by it. I was a particularly talkative and obnoxious child, but it stopped me cold. I can remember rounding a corner and standing there agog while a mouthful of half-formed jabber just rolled backwards down my throat, forever unuttered. I was seven years old and I'm told it was only the second occasion in all that time that I had stopped talking, apart from short breaks for sleeping and television. …
… The scale of the Grand Canyon is almost beyond comprehension. It is ten miles across, a mile deep, 180 miles long. You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it. Indeed you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it and you would still be so high above it that buses would be like ants and people would be invisible, and not a sound would reach your. The thing that gets you - that gets everyone - is the silence. The Grand Canyon just swallows sound. The sense of space and emptiness is overwhelming. Nothing happens out there. Down below you on the canyon floor, far, far away, is the thing that carved it: the Colorado River. It is 300 feet wide, but from the canyon's lip it looks thin and insignificant. It looks like an old shoelace. Everything is dwarfed by this mighty hole."