On our way to return the van in Las Vegas we stop by Hoover dam. There are some cool facts about the dam, but in the end after watching a classic American triumphant PSA video and waiting in a line for 20 minutes the lifts breakdown and we don’t go on the tour. After all that building anticipation! Dang.
Instead, we walk the top to the dam, it’s pretty impressive. Now back to Vegas…
We found a pretty good spot last night to spend sunrise this morning. So we’re up early and ready to go.
We sit in silence and listen to the space, and then some birds and the trees waking up. A couple of loud talkers interrupt briefly but they don’t stay.
After an hour of serenity, we get some cereal and sit on the rim for breakfast. Then we get a bus down to the start of the South Kaibab Trail.
On the South Kaibab Trail we descend into the canyon. Walking under the rim completely changes my mediocre opinion of the Grand Canyon. I don’t know if it’s just the change of perspective that changes my view, or something about feeling inside the landscape, rather than just looking over it. Maybe it’s because there are less people about…
We walk down as far as Cedar Ridge, which shoots out into the canyon, so when we walk right to the peak we can look far along the canyon. The place landscape and this whole place and grows on me.
The walk is much tougher going back up, but a 3-5 hour estimated walk only take us 1.5 hours. I think we are getting fitter!
A piece of advice: walk into the canyons, not just around the top!
After nearly two weeks in the van we are approaching the end of an amazing loop through spectacular national and state parks. The Grand Canyon will be our last park in this part of the country.
We make the drive after antelope canyon, and drive via a Route 66 place called Snow Cap (quirky indeed!) we arrive at the Grand Canyon.
Maybe it’s all the driving, maybe I’m just getting ready for a real bed, but there are some things that bugged me about the Grand Canyon this evening. Mostly it’s the infrastructure (lack of it, including cell coverage), the weird spacing between campground and toilets/showers, the absence of any clear signs to places, that in many places the car routes are twice as short as the walking paths (why?!). Anyway, I’m a bit grumpy by the time we get to the rim trail after checking into the campground and aimlessly wandering about trying to get ANYWHERE.
The rim is cool. But it doesn’t wow me the way that nearly everywhere else has. It’s cool, it’s big, but it’s not as beautiful as I was expecting.
We watch the sunset with a beer and maybe I begin to see something in this place…
The geology museum is pretty good. Beyond the entire back story of each layer of rocks it’s just kind of cool to think that the Colorado River has flowed in the same direction for five million years and in that time, it has cut down through about three hundred million years of rock. That’s incredible.
Spoiler alert – wow wow wow
You can only get into Antelope Canyon on a tour since an event where eleven people died from a flash flood in the late nineties. It’s a stunning slot canyon discovered by a shepherd who lost some sheep in it and climbed in to retrieve them. She carried them out on her back, I’ve no idea how!
The canyon is now full of stairs and access ladders (and emergency ladders). But you can see the foot holds that are the historical access climbing path.
The canyon is completely jammed full of people, who are gently herded (like sheep) into each area and kept out of people photos as best as possible. It’s amazingly touristy, frustratingly so, but definitely worth the crowds. The way the light strikes the rock, lighting edges and lighting up surfaces is stunning.
This is a major Instagram location, so it’s packed and a bit lame as a result. It’s full of people perched along unprotected edges trying to mimic carefully staged professional photographs.
I can see the attraction, it’s a lot like Goosenecks. The main difference is Goosenecks is grey rock without any trees or grass and Horseshoe has red rocks and some grass and trees down by the river. The natural part is great, but it’s brought down by is popularity with one hundred people getting the same photos.
Still, we kinda ironically leaned into the whole look…Anna’s a natural!
