In the beginning, there was a canyon of stunning natural beauty. And an up-and-coming California computer executive, who gave up four-fifths of his earnings to become a canyon tour guide.
And the guide brought forth a coffee-table album that went on sale in the canyon's bookstores.
And then all hell broke loose.
It seems the long-running cultural war between religious conservatives and secularists may very well move from the Ten Commandments monument in Alabama to these majestic cliffs overhanging the Colorado River.
And Washington, which has dominion over every living creature here, has already gotten involved.
Last December, a group of seven prominent geologists and paleontologists fired off a letter to the National Park Service, demanding that a book by Tom Vail, "The Grand Canyon: A Different View," be banished from canyon park bookstores because it "aggressively attacks modern science."
The book indeed promotes a theory that the Grand Canyon was created as a result of the biblical flood, rather than carved in the rock by the Colorado River over two billion years, as scientists claim.
So the wheels of government bureaucracy moved.
The National Park Service has launched a review of the matter but made clear it wanted no part of the scramble.
"We teach scientific explanations," NPS spokeswoman Elaine Sevy said in a telephone interview. "However, we don't ever want to be in the business of censoring viewpoints."
In case the park service buckles under pressure, Christian conservatives rolled out their own big gun.
The Alliance Defense Fund, a non-profit group from Phoenix, sent a warning straight to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, saying that if Vail's book is removed from park bookstores, her department "will expose itself to almost certain liability."
That means a lawsuit and possibly an election-year court battle that could sour President George W. Bush's warm relationship with Christian conservatives, a major Republican constituency.
From the comfort of his Phoenix home, Vail eyes the standoff in wonderment.
"The idea that a little book could create such a commotion is amazing to me," laughs this 55-year-old man with a graying beard and piercing eyes.
He believes the canyon has a magic spell and an unparalleled spiritual power.
Nearly a quarter-century ago, Vail, then a rising young executive with a Fortune 500 company in Los Angeles, went to the Grand Canyon on vacation and for the first time sailed through its red-stone narrow gorges on a raft.
What was it that took hold of his life then? The golden rays of the rising sun painting the somber terraces a flaming red? Or echoes bouncing off jugged sandstone and granite walls?
It hardly matters anymore, Vail argues. But that was a vacation from which he never really returned.
In 1983, he hung up his business suit and became a river tour guide, giving up more than 80 percent of his salary.
It was there, in the canyon, that he met his future wife, Paula. The couple now run a small company that organizes trips for Christians coming to the Grand Canyon in search of inspiration.
"Life makes more sense to me now -- this life and the life to come," Vail wrote in his book.
It is not the first time that religious activists and secularists have clashed against the backdrop of this giant earthly chasm, which attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year.
Last July, even before the Ten Commandments monument was carted away from the Alabama Judicial Building on a judge's order, Grand Canyon park superintendent Joseph Alston ordered the removal of three plaques with psalms installed by evangelical nuns at three observation points in the 1960s.
The move came after a query from the American Civil Liberties Union, a watchdog group that seeks to uphold the separation of church and state, among other constitutional protections.
But his decision was quickly countermanded by National Park Service Deputy Director Donald Murphy, who had the plaques restored.
And so it goes with no respite in sight, even on the seventh day.