Coverage inside the park is patchy by terrain and by policy, and most visitors discover this in the middle of trying to navigate, at the worst possible moment.
I trained in kitchens, where the phone goes in a locker at the start of service and comes out at the end, so the first day felt less like deprivation than like work. The second day was different.
What came back was a kind of attention I associate with prep. When there is nothing to check, you start noticing ratio. The way the understory changes composition at a certain elevation the way a stock changes when you finally get the scum off. The specific sound of water over sandstone versus water over the older rock further in. It is a difference in pitch I could not have described before and cannot stop hearing now.
The practical part is less romantic. Paper maps exist and the park sells good ones. What paper cannot do is tell you whether the lot at your trailhead is already full, and that turns out to be the thing modern trip planning is actually built around. Twice I drove to a trailhead, found no parking, and had to invent a different day on the spot.
Which was fine. Both invented days were better than the ones I had planned, and I am suspicious of that observation because it is exactly what this kind of piece always concludes.
So I will put it more narrowly. I did not become calmer. I became worse at logistics and better at looking.