Lowell Observatory’s Kevin Schindler runs a detective story at the Grand Canyon.
In this historic shot taken in 1964, Neil Armstrong, practicing to become the first person to step on the Moon, rests momentarily along the trail from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. Credit: NASA
When John Kennedy announced the United States’ ambition to reach the Moon, the wheels began turning in every possible direction. In early 1964 the first group of astronauts were hard at work training for the upcoming missions. Areas of training included Meteor Crater, selected regions around Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon — all chosen for suitably strange habitats that would allow some comparison to the Moon’s surface, and also allow the astronauts to become geologists.
One of my pals has been very interested in the history of this era for a long time, and he has written stories and several books about this era and about this region. He is Kevin Schindler, Lowell Observatory’s historian and an all-around very knowledgeable guy. Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Grand Canyon Star Party along the South Rim. It was my first time there, and I stayed with Kevin and with another pal, Dean Regas, in a house near the South Rim.
One day Kevin and I conducted an experiment. We hiked down a trail from the South Rim, armed with Kevin’s numerous copies of photographs from the early 1960s. The idea here was to match up exactly where some of the famous photos of Apollo astronauts were taken when they were in the early stages of training for the Moon. It was great fun assisting Kevin with this, and the primary image we were looking to identify was one showing Neil Armstrong sitting on a rock near the edge of the trail, with clear and identifiable rock formations well behind him. Moreover, some notable trees were in view, particularly a dead tree trunk angled behind his right shoulder.
In short time, we found the area, which Kevin suspected, and matched the historic image with the current scene, each posing in the same spot, more or less, where Neil was. The rock has changed as the path has changed, but here we were — 61 years later — at the very spot where Neil Armstrong posed.
This kind of historical detective work is fun, and really brings you closer to the scenes and memories of past events. A huge amount of this kind of photo matching happens in American history, where I’ve actually done some of that in books I’ve written about the Civil War.
Kevin’s books that relate most closely to the canyon and to the astronaut training are The Grand Canyon Past & Present (95 pp., Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, South Carolina, 2024), and Northern Arizona Space Training, coauthored with William Sheehan (127 pp., Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, South Carolina, 2017). I encourage you to check them out.
