When you leave the Grand Canyon with your five-year-old singing a song about the ancient seas whose deposits created the canyon's rose-tinged layers, and the river, wind and rains that carved the canyon out of those layers, you know you've had an exceptional travel experience. Such was the case with my family's visit to the Grand Canyon last month when my husband and I and our daughters, ages 11 and 5, went on a "Meet the Canyon" hike with Michael Buchheit, director of the Grand Canyon Field Institute, an outdoor education program that works with the National Park Service.

Our hike was an up-close, one-foot-after-the-other walk down Bright Angel Trail. Mike pointed out easy-to-miss details like fossilized sponges deposited by the seas that covered this part of the earth 1.7 billion years ago, Anasazi pictographs of antelope or elk that Mike theorized were direction signs to fertile hunting grounds, and plants ranging from cactus to junipers that are evidence of the canyon's many microclimates.

The Grand Canyon is overwhelming in its grandeur. Its age is almost beyond comprehension. But Mike was able to bring it into human scale by telling us that each step down our trail was a step back 15,000 years in geologic time. He pointed out the cottonwoods at Indian Gardens a half mile below us, a magical name for a water-rich spot in a canyon in which water is a scarce commodity. That's despite the fact that the Colorado River running through it carries between 10,000 and 20,000 cubic feet of water per second, providing the life source of water to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, several Arizona cities and tribal lands.

Then there were the stories of the people of the Grand Canyon. Some were the nameless hunters who first started passing through here in pursuit of big game, like the giant sloth. Later came miners, adventurers and entrepreneurs -- some visionary, some purely profit driven, some downright cantankerous and all independent minded. Then there was Ralph Cameron, who quickly realized that the profit in his mining claim lay not in the ore beneath the surface in but in taking the fat cats of the day down the trails on mules, charging them a handsome $1 a day for the privilege. And Emory Kolb, irascible and daring, who with his brother Ellsworth filmed a wild ride through the canyon in 1911 and showed it twice a day to visitors for 65 years in the rambling house they built on a ledge blasted out of the canyon's walls. Finally, there's the hero of the Grand Canyon, Theodore Roosevelt, adventurer, proto-environmentalist and U.S. president.

We toured the Kolb Studios, a carefully restored fantasy of a cliff-side home that caught my 11-year-old's heart with its multi-level rooms and their outlooks and hidden crannies. She loved poking her own head through the opening Kolb had cut in a wall overlooking Cameron's trail so he could call to the mule skinners to halt in order to take photos of early tourists on their way down Cameron's trail (today it's called the Bright Angel Trail). Even after Kolb's death in 1976, the mules continued to stop, obediently waiting to have their riders' photos taken. Today, a limited number of visitors are allowed on a first-come, first-serve basis into the house, which the Grand Canyon Association has spent $1.2 million restoring.

Mike had a good handle on his audience; he pointed out that some distant glints in the April sunshine were solar panels powering composting toilets, a fact both my daughters loved. He approved a few other hikes that we had picked out to do on our own -- one a trip on an unmarked trail to Shoshone Point, a highly exposed point where the vertigo-prone may find themselves crawling in order to get a photo of themselves perched on the edge of nothingness. He also pointed us to "Ooh-Ah Point," another highly exposed, knee-knocking point down the South Kaibob Trail where it's easy to find yourself dizzied by the panorama surrounding you. He almost guaranteed that we would see condors on this hike, and indeed we did, getting a close look at the distinctive white markings under their 10-foot wing spans. It's a species whose numbers had dwindled to 20; now there are perhaps 200, and we saw two of them.

We just had a taste of all that the Field Institute -- and the Grand Canyon -- has to offer. The Field Institute has a whole catalog of outings. There are day hikes, overnight backpacking trips, rim-to-rim trips, river-rafting trips, mule-assisted trips and more. The focus can be on ancient cultures, geology, archeology natural history, photography, and more. It has special women's classes and outings, family classes and outings and a wilderness experience menu that includes introductory, intermediate, advanced and expert levels.

The Field Institute also has partnered with Xanterra, the National Park Service concessionaire, to offer a two-night "Learning & Lodging Adventure" in the park. You can package a Field Institute experience with a flight out of Las Vegas, taking your clients from that glittering temple of artifice to nature's masterpiece. The institute also will speak to groups in the Southwest, a prime opportunity for travel agents building a group trip. It has a full-time staff of four and educators who are authors, naturalists, scientists, former park rangers, scientists and adventurers themselves.

If you've got clients who love the out of doors, this is a real adventure for them. And when they come back, they'll thank you for it. Even if they're not actually singing their own song about the Grand Canyon upon their return, they'll probably be humming it quietly when they think no one is listening.