I was picked up at my hotel at about 10:00am, and driven to meet the rest of the group. There were 7 people in all on the tour. We drove to the canyon in a minivan, and Steve, the tour guide, did an excellent job of relaying the history of the area. In keeping with what I have begun to expect of the southwest, the scenery along the drive was stunning. Before I knew it, we were approaching the Painted Desert. The picture on the left shows the beginning of it, off in the distance behind it you can see Gray Mountain - sort of the beginning of the Grand Canyon on the southe
ast side. According to Navajo legend, the gods took a rainbow from the sky and embedded it into the earth; it really is quite beautiful. We entered the desert, which is part of an extremely large Navajo Reservation (when I say large, I mean the size of West Virginia). On the reservation, we stopped at a Navajo trading post, and I was able to get another magnet for my collection. We stayed there only briefly before returning to the main road, on the way into the Grand Canyon. I was pretty psyched at this point - seeing the Canyon has been on my "must do" list for most of my life.
Approaching the canyon, to the right of 64 as you climb Gray Mountain, lies this unbelievably huge gorge (pictured left) - I wish I could remember the name of it ; Steve told us that it was about 2000 feet deep; you could see Navajo trading markets along the edges of it here and there. There's no fence around it. It really was stunning; I didn't see how the Canyon was going to beat it. As we climbed further and further up the mountain, I found myself starting to get a little frightened; Steve - being used to the drive - went very quickly and to my mind very close to the edge. By the time we entered the park, my heart was racing. The Canyon itself was everything I had expected it to be. We saw it from three different views, the Watchtower view, Grandview, and from the Grand Canyon Village area. All were pretty amazing, but Grandview was my favorite. This was the site of one of the earliest hotels at the canyon, although it closed a very long time ago and little of it remains. There is an old mining path there - the owner of the hotel took his guests down it on mule rides over a hundred years ago. I looked at that path - and for a billion dollars you could not get me to ride a mule down it. Insane. The Grand Canyon Village area was very touristy and packed with people, but kind of cool too. The hotels there were built in the late 1800s, by someone named Harvey (his hotel was the competition that crushed the hotel at Grandview). The girls who worked there were famous - known as the "Harvey Girls" - and there was a movie made about them starring Judy Garland once upon a time. I imagine staying at one of those hotels must be nice; in a room overlooking the canyon at night.
The whole day was amazing. It's hard to understand being there, in the presence of something so truly magnificent. I wanted to get away from the tourism and down into the canyon itself, and so I think someday I'll go back; either to hike the canyon or perhaps to take a trip down the Colorado river way at the bottom. Still, I'm so glad I've been there and seen it; as always the pictures do it no justice. This is really something you need to experience for yourself, and I hope that everyone gets a chance to. Meanwhile, maybe my pics will give you some idea. I took about a million of them, by the way (ok, 98 pics, but that's still a lot). I won't put them all here - just a few of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them!
Here's one of the first pics I took - the view from Watchtower when we first entered the park:
This is a view down into the canyon - taken from Grandview:
This is that mule path at Grandview; like I said - NO WAY:
The view from Grand Canyon Village:
1 comment:
I'm playing catch up but all I could think of was the Brady's riding mules into the canyon. Guess why they get the big bucks! Oh, Marcia!!!
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